‘Can you describe Christianity in five words?’ My little sister is sprawled on my bed with Princess Elsa socks kicking the air. She turns to me and replies ‘no’. Then she smirks. We are discussing the Keswick Convention in my room (more interesting than her room) with her taking up my whole bed (obviously). Charis has attended the Keswick Convention for the past five years. Her earliest memories of the kids programme are of making the friends she still has today. She lists them for me - there are many.
I had never attended a Christian convention until a few years ago, so am relatively new to the experience. Unlike my other Christian friends I never even ventured to a Spring Harvest festival! A quick Google informs me of the many and varied faith conventions that take place in UK each year, but what a search engine cannot tell me is what these events are like for kids today. What and how do they learn? Is it more like work or play? Put simply - what do they get out of it?
Charis attempts to fill me in, temporarily ungluing herself from her tablet. She tells me that in this youth programme they do ‘different things every week, every year’. This particular year her first week was devoted to the book of Revelation, while her second focused on Isaiah. I ask her what she has learnt so far, and she gleefully runs off to retrieve her Bible, warning me ‘this may take some time’. She has been known to lose her shoes at school, so I believe her. Eventually she returns and embarks on a lengthy discussion on the use of numbers in Revelation: ‘4 means the 4 corners of the earth, 12 means followers of God because of the 12 disciples…and for some reason 7 means perfect, so God’s number is 777 …it said in Revelation that there would be a beast who was going to pretend to be like Jesus but wouldn't be quite like Jesus, and his number was 666 because he fell short of Jesus’.
How did my littlest sister learn such big spiritual truths? ‘Quite easily,’ she says. The leaders read them a passage, then ‘explain it piece by piece and put it all together’. There is space to ask questions on the passage, or on anything they like - no question is off limits. They also enter into group discussion - an activity which fills many adult Christians with dread, but which eleven-year-olds engage in without a second thought. In their groups the kids are given a scenario with two parts. The first part will seem terrible and traumatic (think storms, passengers overboard, that sort of thing) but part two reveals a bigger picture (a second ship discovered drifting far from shore, a mutual rescue). This activity is designed, Charis explains, to illustrate God’s bigger plan for the world - how life’s events can seem terrible until all is revealed.
As you would expect, prayer time is scheduled into the programme, where the group are encouraged to pray out loud or in their heads. Which does Charis do? ‘Sometimes I pray in my head and sometimes I pray out loud depending on what I’m praying’
My sister and I were both brought up Christians, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t had to carve our own paths during our journeys of faith. Charis recalls a day when she was three: ‘I came home from nursery and said “Mum! Some of the nice people there, they’re not Christians!” I thought everybody in the world was Christian’. Understanding that her faith was a choice, not compulsory, made her belief even stronger.
Like many Christian festivals, the Keswick Convention (which Charis counts down to every year) strengthens her relationship with God, assisting her when life throws obstacles to belief in her way: ‘sometimes I feel like you can’t be sure about your faith, and then you come here, and you see all these people and hear about what they’ve done, and think this can’t be fake, if this is all happening, and this is only a small proportion…It makes me feel blessed’.
When asked if she wants to come back next year she becomes even more animated, shaking her bandana-clad head up and down and gesticulating wildly as she replies: ‘every year I go back home and wish it lasted the whole of my school holiday. By the end you are yearning for more. Lots of leaders who have come back were kids here. It’s a wonderful place. You feel so happy that there is always someone who you will meet and make great friends with.’
Before she heads off for the evening programme I try my question one last time: ‘Can you describe Christianity in five words?’ She bites her lips and fidgets on my duvet, deep in thought. Eventually she answers with five points instead of words, feeling that the question demands a greater word-count:
‘You feel loved, cared for, safe, excited, and it makes your life better in general’.
My little sister has learned deep spiritual concepts while having fun, and strengthened her faith through the support of the Christian community- a convincing ambassador for the positive impact of Christian conventions on kids today.
Hannah Cooper is a writer and lives in Woking, Surrey.
