Faith Curriculum Library: Tapestry of Faith: Amazing Grace: A Program about Exploring Right and Wrong for Grade 6

Faith In Action: You In The Other

Part of Amazing Grace

Activity time: 20 minutes

Description of Activity

This activity will allow youth to know one another better. Introduce it with words like these:

Our faith calls on us to treat each other in right ways. Doing that means we must all get to know each other better. Therefore, for Faith in Action today, we will each find out something more about other people in this room.

Two people meeting for the first time might think of themselves as opposites. But the more they get to know each other, the more they see themselves as like each other. Let us see if that happens to us today.

Ask the youth to choose as partners others in the room whom they do not know well - "In other words, please do not get together with your best friend." If you have an odd number of youth, you can have one meet with a leader or form one group of three youth.

Say that in the next few minutes, each pair should discover one or two ways that they are the same and one of two ways that they are different-ways they did not know about before, and not obvious physical differences. "You may already know that one of you is taller than the other or that one of you is a girl and the other a boy. We want you to look a little deeper than that."

If possible, keep the pairs far enough apart so they will not overhear each other. Have leaders move about the room and assist any pairs who are having trouble getting started. Ask some obvious questions, such as, "Do you like sports?" to get things going.

Give a one-minute warning as appropriate and then ask the full group to reassemble. Give each pair a chance to report what it has found. If some pairs have not discovered much about each other, be reassuring: "Sometimes it takes a lot more time than we have to really get to know other people."

Then ask for comments. Have they learned more about each other? Do they agree that this is a useful approach for people who want a better, more virtuous world with less hate and less fighting? Do they agree that it is okay for people to be the same in some ways and different in other ways? Is life more interesting because people are often different?

Encourage youth to try this activity if they find themselves in the midst of a group of people who do not know each other well but who must work on a project together.