Learning from Young People’s Experiences of Communion:
Re-envisioning the Meal as a Space for Nurturing Faith
- Linda Hopkins
Image: A reconstruction of a research participant’s photograph, showing communion celebrated as a meal: photo credit, Linda Hopkins
Introductory reflection
The status of children and young people at the table of the Lord is still uncertain in many of our churches today. In her Whitley Lecture, Linda Hopkins invites us to reflect on the way we create sacred spaces that welcome the insight and presence of these growing generations. She challenges us to be bolder and more willing to consider how we do this when we meet to share bread and wine.
This lecture invites us to reimagine communion as a sacred space in which all are welcomed. In particular, she invites us to recognise that even the simplest communion meal is a ritual and that attending to what is both seen and heard is essential, for so much of our learning is experiential.
Linda considers the liminal quality of adolescence, in which the questions young people ask can serve as a gift for the whole church. She draws on her research with young people in Baptist churches, which offered a safe space for young people to express views on their experiences of communion. Giving voice to young people and enabling them to be heard and valued was central to her approach. She used visual ethnography to allow feelings to be named and new insights to emerge, and through this approach shows how ‘bottom up’ learning began to happen. This has so much to teach us all.
In the lecture Linda draws on theories of learning, considers the ritual space of communion in our Baptist settings, and works with her research findings to show how we might re-envision the communion meal for young and old; growing, learning, and being nurtured in faith alongside one another. As Linda affirms, sacred spaces in which young people are genuinely welcomed, including communion, are spaces in which we discover, perhaps joyfully like the disciples on the Emmaus Road, that we all are pilgrims together.
Romilly Mark Janes, Whitley Secretary
New North Road Baptist Church. Huddersfield.
Linda Hopkins is a Baptist Minister with a portfolio ministry, working in a freelance capacity as spiritual director, mentor and coach to individuals and church groups. She studied and taught youth work and ministry, has an MA in Reflective Practice and Applied Theology and is completing her doctoral research in Contextual Theology at Luther King House, Manchester. She recently served Waterloo United Free Church, Merseyside (Baptist/URC), as their minister. She lives in West Lancashire with her husband Peter, and they have two adult children.
Baptists Together online Whitley Lecture
Learning from Young People’s Experiences of Communion:
Re-envisioning the Meal as a Space for Nurturing Faith.
The text of this year's Whitley Lecture has also been published as a book, and is
available from Amazon.
Click here to download previous Whitley Lectures.
Images: Linda Hopkins