Happy New Year!
January is often a time when people reflect on what has happened over the previous year and so to help you with your January and post Christmas blues, we want to take the opportunity to look back and tell you about last month’s Christmas assembly, which was delivered to pupils in Glenwood and Glenrothes High School. The theme for this year’s Christmas assembly (or last year’s, depending on the way you look at it) was “reconnecting at Christmas”, which allowed us to explore the fact that God sent Jesus to reconnect with us.
Before we looked at the idea of “reconnecting”, we started by looking at the concept of “connecting” as we explored the impact of social media with pupils. It’s been sixteen years since Facebook first launched online and it has impacted the world around us in ways that many of us would have thought unthinkable in 2004. Facebook has an estimated 2.4 billion monthly users around the world and there are thought to be a total of 3.2 billion users of Social Media globally. Back in the 1990s, BT told us that it was “good to talk” but today our society would say “it’s good to be connected.”
Following on from this, we showed pupils Sky’s 2019 Christmas Advert depicting the reunion of ET and Eliot from Stephen Spielberg’s ET. Through the advert we see homage paid to the 1980s film, while many new ideas and concepts (like the internet) are explained to ET by Eliot’s children. The premise of the advert (other than selling Sky subscriptions) is to encourage viewers to “reconnect at Christmas” and so it seemed like a good idea to show the advert and to use it to talk about how God sent Jesus to reconnect with us, as his creation.
Beginning with Genesis 1 we explored the way in which God and humanity had, at one time, shared a perfect relationship which was broken by the fall. We then explored the way in which Jesus came to restore that relationship and went on to talk about how Isaiah had prophesised about Jesus, describing him as “a great light.”
Sometimes our lives can seem pretty dark. We all have our own struggles, our own difficulties and our own hurts. At some point or other we all walk in darkness but over 700 years before Jesus was born, Isaiah predicted he would be a light to those in darkness and over 2000 years after he was born, Jesus is still a light for people walking in darkness. To help illustrate this further we shared the story of Dez who came to faith through an Alpha Course and who’s life was completely changed by meeting Jesus.
We ended our time with pupils by asking them to consider their responses to two questions; who do think Jesus is? And who can they make an effort to connect or reconnect with at Christmas?
If you want to watch the ET Advert or the story of Dez then you can find them at the following links:
God Bless and Happy New Year