Well, I am not exactly sure how Jesus felt then. But given just 1.5 hours, how was I supposed to facilitate a collective reflection for a group of 600 pax with kids as young as 2 years old to folks as old as 80? This was my task for a church camp of such magnitude with members of 5 different Chinese speaking congregations coming together for the first time for a combined church camp.
Thanks to a very creative friend's bright spark- Ee Tuo the man behind the provocative and often entertaining banners in front of Orchard Presbyerian Church! He suggested "Why not create a book compilation of ideas- with a 'pinch' of visual challenge?" Due to budget constraints, printing a flipbook seemed near impossible then. However, working on the $$ issue, I swung to the other extreme- not a flipbook but a single sheet of flipchart and a pack of coloured markers. What can the good folks do? The simple, heuristic problem was posed - "What does a happy family mean to you?". Challenge- Thou shall not draw anything inside the figure (is it a bone? A butterfly? An angel??) I intentionally left the big ? in everyone's mind for their own interpretation of what the pre-drawn figure was.
Below are some of my personal favorites:
I was very thankful that this big challenge indeed turned out to be a favorable juncture of circumstances that turned out well. At the end of it all, the process of discussion and brainstorming was useful to gel everyone together and providing the opportunity to display everyone's creative ideas. Even the kids had some good fun and they were the really creative ones- who says it must be only 2D? As for the rest of the groups' chart, it was evident that most expressed a vision of what an ideal family may look like with articulation of the 'recipes' of some ground rules, principles, and goals.
So what do you think the ambiguous figure in the middle of the chart represents?
