Birmingham City Mission Information

The Birmingham City Mission's children's team makes first contact with primary school aged children by offering to lead the daily Act of Collective Worship or 'assembly'. During the year, the team delivered a termly assembly to 70 schools within the catchment area. Stories told this year were 'Cain and Abel', 'the boy Jesus at the Temple', and 'the official's son' (John 4). 200 assemblies were led in total, including 18 Christmas specials and 11 Easter specials. 'Specials' are great fun and very well received: they are thirty-minute assemblies comprising a story, two puppet sketches and a quiz, game or song. For some children BCM gives a weekly input of Bible teaching. We continued to run after-school clubs in two inner city schools, covering such topics as 'respect', 'prayer', 'the life of David' and 'working together', with material based on the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, 1 Samuel and Nehemiah. Lessons, Moving On Roadshow and 'Bus days' mean that approximately 1,800 children had an opportunity to consider the claims of Christianity in more depth this year. We have been deliberately less active in terms of delivering RE lessons, doing Easter and Christmas lessons only while waiting for the launch of the new Birmingham RE syllabus. However, we visited six schools with the ' Moving On Roadshow ', a two-hour programme that gives Year 6 pupils an opportunity to take stock spiritually before moving on to senior school. We were joined for ' Moving On ' by the Red Balloon Theatre Company who helped us deliver Bible teaching in a variety of engaging styles. For schools outside Birmingham, we offer a bus programme that combines a whole school assembly with four lessons on the Bus exploring the work of BCM. This year we delivered two days of Harvest lessons and two days of Easter lessons.