Responsibilities

What are we responsible for?

by Kay Partridge

Suitable for Whole School (Pri)

Aims

To help us to understand our responsibility towards ourselves, others and our planet.

Preparation and materials

• pictures (printed or on screen – laptop needed)
• chocolates/sweets
• Bible verse printed out separately
• a Bible
• a can of Coke.

Assembly

1. Who knows what responsibility means? It means being in charge of something, having control of something. So, for example, your teachers are responsible for helping you to learn things while you are at school.

I have some pictures of people here and I wondered if you could tell me what these people are responsible for . . . (just some ideas but you can come up with some more suited to your locality)

• Roy Hodgson
• the Prime Minister
• a doctor
• Simon Cowell.

2. That’s really good, well done – there are some things that different people are responsible for, aren’t there? But there are also things that we all can be responsible for. So I need some help here: I’d like you to remember these things and remind me of them at the end.

3. Sweets – we are responsible for taking care of others and putting others first. Please can you take these and make sure all the teachers get one?

Bible verse – we are responsible for learning and making the best of ourselves (‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’, John 13.34).

Can of Coke – we are responsible for making sure we take care of the planet.

OK, do you remember that verse? Do you think you could shout it out? 

Time for reflection

Christians believe that the biggest responsibility we have is to love each other. I have a verse that I would like to read out to finish and I would like you to think about your responsibility to care and love for others – does this verse say how you could go about that? Then I am going to pray and, if you would like to join me in that prayer, feel free to say ‘Amen’ at the end.

1 Corinthians 13: the gift of love

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,^* but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. 

Prayer

Lord, help us to put others first and to take care of the people around us.
Thank you for your love for us.
Amen.

Song/music

‘Love is something if you give it away’ (available to download)