Our friends at Dare2Engage have been working hard on a new resource called OPEN, designed to facilitate personal reflection on questions of life, values and faith/belief. If you are a chaplain working in a West Midlands FE college and would like to help trial this, do get in touch with Dare2Engage.
Category: News
fbfe West Midlands FE Faith Forum for college staff to share best practice in SMSC. Friday 15th November 2013, 12.00-3.15pm, starting with lunch and networking. Venue: North Warwickshire and Hinckley College (Nuneaton Campus). To book now, contact Jennifer Roberts at: jennifer.roberts@churchofengland.org.
fbfe (The National Council for Faith and Belief in Further Education (http://www.fbfe.org.uk/)) convenes regional forums to support colleges in their endeavour to ensure staff and students are engaging with matters of faith and belief. As part of previous meetings we have reviewed: SMSC guidance issued by LSIS, managing chaplaincy, tackling faith in policy; and concerns with the community cohesion agenda. It is a great chance to network and discover what other colleges are doing on this topic. This forum is part-funded by LSIS to support your college in matters of SMSC guidance. Curriculum Managers, Student Support, Student Services Managers, Equality and Diversity Manager, Vice Principals and chaplains normally attend. This forum is organised jointly with the West Midlands Churches’ Further Education Council.
Having posted a number of links to resources on reconciliation and good discussion/dialogue practice in recent weeks, readers may be interested to know that WMCFEC is considering running the third in its series of ‘faith literacy’ workshops for FE college staff on this topic in Spring Term 2014. Do you have any experiences or stories to share? Or have any views on what might be most helpful for such a workshop to include? If so, please get in touch!
If you are regularly dealing with issues of individual and community conflict in your college, some great resources are available from the West Midlands Quaker Peace Education Project – including some high-quality short films on their Vimeo pages, which can be used as discussion starters. The main focus of the project’s activity is the schools sector, but there’s plenty here that can be used in FE too.
We’re particularly glad to share this information as a tribute to Linda Pegler, much-valued Quaker representative on WM Churches’ FE Council and formerly involved in the WMQPEP, who sadly died earlier this year.
One of the most common issues we hear raised around the place of faith and belief in college life concerns the lack of confidence amongst some members of college staff in curating discussions about faith and belief, or in dealing with disputes and discussions when they arise. Some help is given in a report on Dealing with Faith- and Belief- Based Differences, Disputes and Conflicts, researched for FBFE (The National Council of Faiths and Beliefs in Further Education) by Neville and Yvette Adams, and published last year. Take a look and see what you think.
This autumn, WMCFEC seeks to gather together a group of those involved in further education from the region (chaplains and college staff) who would be interested in helping to develop resources for reflection on their work in FE, based on the Book of Jonah. If you’re interested, get in touch (and dare I say, we’ll have a whale of a time…)
Equality and Diversity Managers may be particularly interested to read new guidelines from the Interfaith Network for the UK on catering for the faith-based dietary practices of different faiths.
As a footnote, the table shows how comparatively few food rules are found within Christianity. Does this mean Christians are completely uninterested in questions about food? Or is something else going on? This is a personal take, rather than an official statement, but I hope it captures helpfully some of the key themes in Christians’ attitudes to food, which I think are shaped by several different considerations:
1) A strong underlying theme in Jesus’ teaching to his disciples (i.e., followers/apprentices) is that they must go beyond observance of external laws to a ‘new law’ which is ‘written on their hearts’ – the importance of inner motivation and purity is key. So whilst observant Jews who accept Jesus as Son of God and Saviour may still observe many Jewish food laws, the general principle which Christians have tended to adopt is that purity of heart, mind and intention is more of a priority.
2) In the New Testament book of Acts (Chapter 10), one of Jesus’ closest followers, Peter, has a dream in which a cloth is laid out before him containing all sorts of foods, some ritually clean and others ritually unclean in the eyes of the Jewish Law, and he is encouraged to eat from the whole selection. This story epitomises a wider shift in very earliest Christianity away from strict observance of the Jewish Law. Some Christians today will talk about how the comparative absence of hard and fast rules of observance in Christianity reflects the fact that their relationship with God is built upon God’s gift of grace and love, rather than on obedience to a set of rules.
3) This flexibility towards food is also seen in the writings of Paul of Tarsus, whose letters to young Christian communities across the Roman Empire comprise most of the second half of the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 9 (first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 9) Paul tackles the question of whether Christians should eat food which has been offered to the gods of other faiths and beliefs. Paul’s answer is that it really depends on whether eating such food tempts you to abandon your faith or get involved in questionable activity (here specifically he is writing about some of the morally questionable behaviour associated with some cults in the Roman world). If it does, then avoid it; if it doesn’t, then there is no problem (although his ‘strong’ readers are urged to be sensitive towards the ‘weak’ in this respect). As a result, Christians may take a variety of attitudes towards eating food prepared according to the rules of other faiths – some will gladly do so; others may be more reluctant.
4) If many Christians believe they are liberated from the requirement to obey specific food laws, there is strong tradition of fasting or abstaining from certain kinds of food as part of a voluntary personal or collective spiritual discipline (i.e., as a way of focusing on God and demonstrating commitment). At various points in history, Roman Catholic Christians have been encouraged (and at certain points in the past, obliged) to abstain from meat on on particular ‘penitential days’ including Fridays in Lent, in remembrance of Jesus’ death on the cross – and as a result many ate fish instead. When he was Pope, Benedict XVI sought to reassert the value of this practice (but in reality there is variety of contemporary practice – many Catholics do not observe this, whilst others will). Likewise, some Catholic and some evangelical Christians may choose to fast either weekly, monthly or at certain times of year (e.g., Lent – the period before Easter). There may also be a general sense, for many Christians, that apart from specific fasting days, over-indulgence is not a good thing (this is found in numerous places in the Jewish and Christian scriptures).
5) Since there are comparatively few specific laws or rules within Christianity, Christians have always therefore needed to make choices about what is ethically appropriate in the light of their faith (‘Everything is permissible, but not everything is good’, writes St Paul). Recent decades have seen the flowering of a strong commitment in many quarters of the Christian churches towards ethical sourcing and fairtrade, prompted by a desire to care for creation and to show justice to those who are poor or marginalised. Whilst fairtrade and sustainability are concerns shared by people of all faiths and none, Christian individuals and churches have been at the forefront of campaigning for fairtrade in the UK, and against certain products or companies with an ethically questionable reputation. Using fairtrade and ethically sourced produce may therefore be welcomed by Christian staff, students and visitors.
Welcome to our new website, designed for us by Stu Avis of Audacious Creative Communications. Latest news of training, events, publications and other aspects of the Council’s work will appear here – and you can also check the ‘news and events’ page for both new and older posts.
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