Thursday, July 26, 2007

Anger Management

For the first week of my summer break I spent a few days at Fircroft College doing an anger management course. Not that I’ve got any great problem with rampaging around. But I enjoy studying and wanted something that would give me some practical insight into myself. It was a men only course with eight students and one male tutor. I found it a very good environment and felt able to discuss matters deeply in a relaxed manner.

The basis of the course was transactional analysis popularised by the book ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’. Interestingly we looked quite a bit at assertiveness training which all about expressing yourself in a way that so that you get a ‘win, win’ outcome rather than being passive and/or aggressive. You see, if we can express our anger assertively we don’t bottle it up or just lash out we actually use it very positively to effect change in our world.

In the course we looked at some scenes from the movie ‘Anger Management’ with Jack Nicolson. And I bought a copy at a discount price but I haven’t watched it all through yet.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Sunday School Church

My wife Nettes and I have just led another family service. This time it our remit was for the kids in Sunday school – which Nettes leads - to share what God had been teaching them. After talking to the kids we came up with a service that basically followed the pattern of what we do in Sunday school with songs interspersed throughout the morning.

First one of the boys went round with a roving microphone asking people what had been happening to them that week. Then we played a game based around John 3:16 which the children had been learning, which brought out the competitive side of the church. We then told the story of Jonah with a couple of children reading. Then we got everyone to discuss and possibly have a go at acting it out in small groups. We then got people out of their seats doing a choice of craft activities based on the story or looking through some of the Sunday school material. We were amazed how much people participated and felt that we had broken through a barrier of getting people to do different activities in church. All this was supported by PowerPoint with photos of the children, their work and quotes from them about what they had recently learnt about God.

We were really blessed with an email we received just after the service saying from a couple saying how much fun they had and that they came away grinning.