Ethos Education

Inside Out 2: How does what we believe about God affect how we live?

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Learning Objectives:            

  • Examine the idea of how the self is created through experience and memory.
  • Analyse the account of the Apostle Paul’s conversion in order to understand a Christian view of conversion.
  • Understand how belief shapes action and behaviour through a contemporary account.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Understand the role of memory and experience in shaping the belief system, and the Christian perspective that God is active in building belief in individuals.
  • Analyse Bible passages to recreate the narrative of the Apostle Paul’s conversion to Christ.
  • Consider an example of a contemporary character who has professed belief in God.
  • Consolidate learning by writing a letter from the apostle Paul to a friend describing his experience.

Supporting Values Education:

  • The values of Mutual Respect and Tolerance presuppose an understanding and appreciation of beliefs held by different people. This assembly helps pupils begin to think about how their experiences and thoughts will shape their beliefs and consider how belief shapes action.

STARTER:

Give each student a copy of the Thoughts + Memories = Beliefs + Actions worksheet. You may need to help students clarify the three types of statement but explaining that:

Thoughts + Memories (= things you can imagine or remember)

Beliefs (= what you believe to be true)

Actions (= what you are going to do about what you believe)

Talk through the example that:

‘Looking at the sky on a clear night’ is a thought or a memory (what you can imagine or remember)

‘The universe is enormous, and I am tiny in comparison’ is a belief (what you believe to be true)

‘I’m going to find out more about the universe’ is an action (what you might do about what you believe)

Once students have sorted the statements into the boxes, ask them to think about an example from their own lives of how a thought or a memory has led them to believe something, and has then caused them to take action.

Talk together about how belief is formed by what we experience, either as an event or as a result of something we are told as a child.

Discuss how a person may come to hold a religious belief – see how many examples of thoughts, memories or experiences the class can come up with. This might include being born into a family who observe a particular religion, meeting someone who shares their faith, learning about a religion through reading or watching, reflecting on the existence of God through encountering creation etc.

Explain that in today’s lesson you are going to be thinking about how one individual’s experience changed what they believed about God, but first you are going to think more about belief.

MAIN ACTIVITIES:

Show the clip from Inside Out 2 (Disney Pixar 2024, certificate U). Click here to buy the DVD online.

Explain that this clip comes at the beginning of the sequel to Inside Out. Riley – the main character in the film – is now a teenager, but all her emotions are still active inside her brain. In this excerpt ‘Joy’ is going to explain how Riley’s belief system is formed.

  • Start time: 0.02.58
  • End time: 0.11.02
  • Clip length: 8 minutes 4 seconds

The clip starts with Riley (Kensington Tallman) sitting in the time-out box at the ice hockey rink. While she waits, one of her emotions – Joy – explains through a series of flashbacks that Riley is exceptional. She is top of her class, kind, nice to stray cats, and officially a teenager. Joy explains that Riley’s ‘personality islands’ are still going strong, as they are formed by Riley’s memories. When Sadness points out that ‘Family Island’ is hard to spot, Joy shows her ‘Friendship Island’ which has grown and is obscuring the view. Joy goes on to explain that Riley’s personality is not the only thing that is being formed by her memories – way down at the root level her beliefs are being formed. Her beliefs include being a good friend, a belief that is strengthened through the experience of helping someone. Joy tells the other emotions that when all the strands of belief are put together they make Riley’s sense of self and help her make good choices. She describes Riley as their Masterpiece. The buzzer goes and Riley heads back out onto the ice. Her team wins the championship, and Riley and her friends are approached by the High School hockey coach who invites them to come to a training weekend.  Riley is excited but also anxious about messing up the weekend. As she falls asleep, Joy and the other emotions deal with her ‘bad’ memories by sending them away to the back of her mind so they won’t affect her sense of self. After dealing with Riley’s memories, the emotions head to sleep, but Sadness joins Joy in taking a memory to the Belief System, a spacious place where strands of good memories make up the core of what Riley believes about herself and the world.

Discuss the clip with the students. Did they notice how Riley’s memories and experiences formed her belief system?

All of Riley’s beliefs were formed by memories and thoughts. Does that mean that our beliefs are only formed by what happens to us, or to what we have experienced?

Explain that Christians believe that our belief system is an important part of who we are – our sense of self is shaped by what we believe. But the Bible also teaches that belief can be formed through faith in God – a Being who is outside of the human brain, and who wants to communicate with us and help us.

In order to investigate this idea further, explain that the class is now going to look at the example of a man in the Bible whose belief system was changed when he met God.

Give each student a copy of the Paul’s Encounter worksheet and ask them to complete it. Depending on the reading ability of the class, you could lead students through the sheet from the front, or ask them to complete it in pairs.

Remind students of Riley’s story. Her memories and experiences formed her belief system and this in turn led to her decisions and actions. In the clip, Riley’s memory of helping her friend led to a belief that she was a kind person, and this in turn led to her behaving kindly, and letting her friend score the goal.

In Paul’s story his experience and memory of meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus changed his belief about God and led to him changing his behaviour so he no longer attacked Christians, and spent his time telling other people about God.

For many Christians in the world today, their experience of meeting Jesus has formed a belief that God is real and loves them. Because of this belief, they are involved in actions that help others.

Show an example of a contemporary Christian who has come to believe in Jesus. The Way UK is a YouTube channel with interviews and testimonies. There are many examples there of younger people sharing their faith. The episodes are around 40-45 minutes long so you’ll have to select how much to show – in the example below, you could show the first ten minutes.

In this episode Destini Dolor shares how she came to faith in Jesus after a bad break-up and how she uses her TikTok channel to share her faith:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL_hRrOGbcE

[If time] Talk about what Destini spoke about. Did students spot examples of her memories, her beliefs and her actions? Was there anything they found hard to understand?

Alternatively, you could invite a local Christian to come and be interviewed by the class. If you do this, try and ask questions about their memories or experiences, their beliefs and their actions.

SUMMARY AND ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING:

Give out copies of the Letter Home worksheet. Explain that students now have an opportunity to write a letter from Paul to a friend back home in Tarsus, the town where he was born. Remind students that they must include his MEMORIES, his BELIEFS and his ACTIONS. You can also include some detail of how he feels now that he has become a follower of Jesus.

YOU WILL NEED:

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