Our St. Mary’s church family
This is our church, St. Mary’s, Newchurch-in-Pendle. We are very proud of our connection with the church and the people who serve there. At Christmas, Easter, Education Sunday and at harvest time we gather there with the St. Mary’s family to worship together. We also worship in church once every half term on a school day.
Our vicar Reverend Julie, visits school at least weekly to deliver a whole school collective worship. Both children and staff look forward to Reverend Julie’s visits, as she brings religion to life with her inclusive worships.
Personal Prayer and Reflection
We wish to encourage our children, staff and visitors to spend time during the day to reflect on their friendship with God. To promote this, we have areas around the school where prayer and reflection can take place. These can be found in classrooms, in the yard and in the entrance hall.
Collective Worship
Every day, as a school or as a class, we gather together to worship. As of September 2017, we have embarked on a quest to read the Bible in a year and every week, our Collective Worship Squad (more about them later!) help us to achieve our goal by planning, delivering and evaluating a creative and fun Bible story.
Our Friday afternoon celebration assemblies, to which all families are invited, are an opportunity to tell our children how fabulous they are! Stars of the Week and Star Writers are awarded, team points from the week are collated and the winning team is announced and out of school awards are celebrated too.
Every half-term we choose one of the Fruits of the Spirit to focus on. Families are involved in encouraging our children to live by the fruits of the spirit, which are gentleness, goodness, self-control, love, patience, kindness, peace, joy and faithfulness (Galatians 5:22-23). Parents can award their children a certificate when their children have shown this value in their everyday life and the certificate will be given out in collective worship. They are displayed on the collective worship board in the hall for everybody to celebrate how our children show the fruits of the spirit in their home and school life.
The collective worship squad play a very important role in the life of our school. It is their job to plan an effective collective worship weekly timetable, under the direction of our R.E. subject leader and headteacher, and deliver our collective worship on Tuesdays when we are working towards our goal of reading the Bible in a year. Everybody in the school appreciates their hard work.