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KINGSWOOD IN FOCUS 2020-21 | COMMUNITY & WORLD ACTION
CHAPLAINCY Amongst the many educational challenges the pandemic has thrown at us, the question of how to ensure the spiritual life of Kingswood remains healthy has been at the forefront of our minds.
T
he world of young people is full of doubt and difficulty – today’s teenagers are already being dubbed ‘generation Covid’ – and the prospect of long-term damage to the spiritual wellbeing of our young people is real. It has therefore been of such importance that the Methodist values of the School should continue to speak clearly into the community. It has been a great privilege to serve as interim Chaplain during
this challenging period. Given my main role as Deputy Head Academic, there has been a limit to what I have been able to achieve. One of my key priorities, however, was keeping alive our tradition of worship. I remember first arriving at Kingswood and being rendered speechless by the vitality of the School’s worship tradition – I have never known a senior school engage so fully with a school-based service. I have regularly found the weekly gathering to be a deeply moving experience.
It is, of course, very difficult to recreate the real experience of physically gathering together for an act of corporate worship, but we have tried our best to leverage technology to bring people together. When we were in school, students gathered as tutor groups and houses to watch whole school service videos together. Each week, members of the community prepared thoughtful talks and prayers to stimulate spiritual reflection, and to try and create a moment of calm in an otherwise stormy situation. In addition, many of our fantastic musicians offered to record themselves playing their instruments – we even managed to keep alive the tradition of hymn-singing as both teachers and students recorded sung worship for all to enjoy. It was wonderful, too, to be able to include Mike Wilkinson and Jonathan Pye on the roster of worship leaders, as well as the Headmaster and Gordon Opie. Throughout our first term we enjoyed a wide range of inspiring talks, ranging from Dan Darwin (Head of History) exploring the uncomfortable tensions of Bath’s colonial past, through to Gordon Opie’s reflections on the importance of routines and places that are special to us all. We tried hard, too, to preserve some of the other worship traditions of the school calendar. Many of you may have seen our recreation of the annual Remembrance Service – a collaborative effort involving
