4 minute read
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.
The 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
students and teachers to mark this very important occasion, to ensure that our young people did not miss the call to remember the past, despite the pressing distraction of the present. Christmas, too, needed to be marked by appropriate worship. I remember reflecting that it was a time like no other where the urgency of the Christmas story would seem even more relevant to our lives, with its social upheaval, difficult journeys and a climate of fear and difficulty. The message of Christmas focuses on the light in the darkness; many of our students have experienced a bewildering darkness for the first time in their lives during this pandemic and so our Christmas messages felt more poignant and apposite than usual.
In the Summer term, we slowly began to emerge from lockdown. The vaccine programme had just reached 50% of the UK population, and our students had returned from all over the world to reconnect with their community. Year 11 and Year 13 faced internal assessments that would help decide their final grades in the summer. Some anxiety still hung in the air, but it was less heavy than before, and seemed more definable. The sun started to shine and there was a new optimism growing in our daily interactions. The school gathered again physically in assembly spaces and it felt good to be together again in corporate worship, reflecting on the truths contained in scripture and meditating on the areas of our lives where we could be thankful, and praying for those less fortunate than ourselves who continued to live under the very real threat of overloaded hospital systems or oxygen shortages. We therefore felt greatly blessed to tentatively begin our plans for the larger end of year events.
For me, this year has presented great challenges, but also great opportunities. It is a true blessing and honour to say that I have served as Chaplain to Kingswood School, even in a temporary and much-reduced capacity. Ours is a special community, rooted deeply in a wonderful tradition of love, justice, compassion, inclusion and service. This school has endured many trials through the years and has stood the test of time, charting the difficult waters set before it. The rich Wesleyan heritage we still celebrate is testament to our school’s spiritual resilience.
This latest period of our history will surely be remembered by all as profoundly unsettling and sad but, I hope, will also be held as a time that the Spirit of Kingswood stood firm and braced itself, in faith, against the buffets of the Covid storm, and emerged singing.
