Page 3 - Moravian Messenger June 2019

Once upon a time .
More storytelling in the Church © Sr Laura Wood
Some of the artwork of Paula Flöter © Sr Laura Wood
Sr Lorraine Shorten telling us the story of Creation using Godly Play
© Sr Laura Wood
Storytelling and the art of writing and telling a good story is always a skill I have admired greatly. I am always in awe of the storytellers of this world who make this complex art form appear very easy.
This March I was lucky enough to be invited to the Moravian European Youth Conference. This is an international conference held by the Moravian Church for anyone who works or volunteers with children, youth and families and has a connection with the Moravian Church. The theme this year was storytelling. At the previous year's conference, those gathered had begun to create a story book to tell the history of the Moravian Church and its development across the world.
We met in Berlin. On arrival I was greeted warmly by our hosts at Berlin central station. Soon, we headed to Checkpoint Charlie to find our accommodation and to meet everybody. Eleven of us had gathered for this conference, from across Europe: the Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic and the UK. Some of the people living and working in the Netherlands were also from Suriname, so the sense of this being a global gathering was felt deeply.
We spent time together hearing about one another's work, the different projects and approaches to ministry that connects with young people and their families. There was a commonality that most practitioners had strong links with local schools, some even worked in Moravian schools, but all saw work in schools as a necessity to engage with the local community and families. I found it interesting that one person was currently employed as both a youth worker in a school and a social worker. There was a sense that the remit of youth worker didn't quite fully explain all the work that is involved in working with families and the different needs and dynamics that is unique to each family. His role was soon to be merged into one job title of youth worker, but he was keeping some of the aspects of the social worker role in his new remit.
Storytelling, and how to convey a story to people of all ages, was a topic that was discussed at length, across the different languages when it came to bringing the story book, beautifully written last year to life. We chose to focus on making this book for ages 4-6 years but with the awareness that it has to connect with the adults, who will sit and read this book to the children. The key thing was to work on the graphics and to create a flow throughout the story. The talented artist Paula Flöter came and showed us her work. She stunned us with the level of detail in her drawing; something that would entrance children and be something an adult would engage with because of the beauty of her designs. We were happy to commission her to go and take our ideas and make them into the beautiful artwork to accompany our simple wording.
The book will hopefully help show the history of the Moravian Church through a main character (I won't give this bit away) and this character will visit different places across the world to see what is happening and to learn more about the story of the Moravian Church. Every country at the conference spent time working on individual pages, but we also spent a lot of time together to create a style and a flow that we felt fitted our target audience.
I came away from this conference inspired by the creativity that I had been surrounded by all weekend. It left me thinking about storytelling once more and how the strategies used at this conference could be applied to my role as Family Project Leader. In the future I want to remember to always ask: who is best to tell this story? How do we ensure the story is well received? Is the story part of a wider narrative and if so, who reading or hearing this story would or wouldn't be aware of it? All of us are storytellers as all of us have stories to tell. Yet the skill comes in the delivery and that is something this conference amplified for me.
Sr Laura Wood
PYCC (Provincial Youth and Children's Committee)
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