Visual aids are a really powerful tool to use around children. If you want a child to remember something, giving a visual ‘hook’ to hang the information on really helps. Sometimes this can be really elaborate that we spend weeks putting together (ever tried tracking down some myrrh at the last minute?). Sometimes it’s all a bit last minute. I once arrived to lead an assembly at a primary school, opened my boot and found that I’d left my lovingly prepared assembly behind. I was going to have to make something up using whatever I could find in the car.
In the end, I used various items to illustrate a slightly contrived telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan. It was pretty tenuous and doesn’t warrant getting into now, especially as that would lead on to talking about the time we arrived at a school thinking we were going to a meeting, but then discovered we were leading a lunchtime club for 20 young people. By the end of that story we’ll be so far off the point we’ll never be coming back.
Back at my car, all I thought was, ‘Right, I need some visual stuff and whatever I find I’ll make a story out of.’ And the children enjoyed the slightly strange visual aids. However I was doing something else in that assembly that wasn’t so good.
I was effectively using the story as a visual aid as well. I had something I wanted to say (which the school would like) and chose a Bible story to support it. On this occasion the Parable of the Good Samaritan was going to help children to remember that they ought to help one another even when no one else was.
The problem with this was that it massively undermined the power of the story. Jesus’ parables are full of depth and meaning, but I was stripping all of that back and making it say what I needed it to. We do this a lot – we struggle to trust the children to navigate the story themselves, so we do all the work for them. The story stops being the most important bit and is relegated to being an elaborate visual aid.
Jesus hardly ever told people what his parables meant, rather he left them hanging for his listeners (and us) to navigate, explore and find their own way round. He didn’t use them to support an argument he’d already established. Jesus’ way is a far trickier way to work, especially with children, but when we do the role of the story changes. The visual aid becomes a gift.
The story is a gift because we have given it to the child to explore for themselves and to find meaning in for their lives as fits at that time. As the circumstances and feelings of their lives change so different parts of the story become a resource for the child to draw on. Rather than the story reminding them what to do in a situation that fits with the point I drew from the story, it has become a way of connecting their story to God’s that feeds all of their life.
So in summary: visual aids are good, assemblies can be planned very last minute, but stories are amazing and should not have their power underestimated.