‘The Bible is a great adventure for kids’
A new website aims to help Catholic children. Anna Arco meets its creator Emily Davis
22 August 2008

Emily Davis at CASE's headquarters in London.

Timid-looking in her photograph, Emily Davis is anything but. Evangelisation comes as second nature to this enthusiastic 30-year-old and her brainchild, www.yfaith.co.uk, due to be launched in September, is proof of that. Yfaith is a web resource for children between the ages of 10 and 13 which seeks to bring them deeper into their faith and help them to engage with it from an early age.

"There is surprisingly little out there for that age group between First Communion and Confirmation," says Emily, who is immediately friendly when we meet at the Catholic Agency for Evangelisation (CASE)_headquarters in north London.

"The aim is to create a space for that age group to engage with and explore their faith in a relevant way," she explains. "We hope that it will help them ask questions about how their faith affects their lives and their relationships and come to it that way. It seeks to be engaging them, helping them explore it. The hope would be for them to be able to go deeper in their faith."

Emily's project, which was originally supposed to launch in July, will include interviews by young reporters, articles on faith and witness, news and reviews and later an FAQ page with answers to questions that the kids send in. There will be "girls only" and "boys only" sections on which older teens will witness their faith and "make it okay for them to be open about their faith experience".

There will be catechesis, both direct and indirect. "I'd like to encourage young people to critique the world around them and maybe give the critiques a faith angle," she says.

Will there be any discussion of the Trinity or transubstantiation? I ask almost in jest. I am a little surprised by the answer.

"Yes, there is some stuff about the Trinity already there. We've tried to tackle it but there is just so much and there is a little bit about transubstantiation on the Jesus page, when it talks about the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. What I'm hoping is that these are things that will come up when the kids send in their questions so that we can address it there," says Emily.





The idea for Yfaith was borne out of a mother's conversation with Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham three years ago. She asked the archbishop whether there could not be more resources for children in their early teens and the suggestion was eventually passed on to CASE, where it finally landed with Emily. In the two years Emily has worked on the project, which only constitutes a third of all the work she does for CASE, it has evolved and come to fruition. Its present incarnation is very much Emily's work with the help of a web designer. Like any big project of that sort - Yfaith has had an initial outlay of £20,000 - it has gone through committees, conferences, focus groups and had its share of teething problems. The date for the launch was moved because the kids testing the site had trouble identifying with the layout and some of the content, which was too long and difficult. But Emily seems optimistic about this setback.

"We had really positive feedback from the focus group which made us reassess the way the site was structured," she says. "It looks very different from two months ago." Over the last six months Emily has been collecting writers, both from a pool of young people and from ordained, religious and lay people, while also writing a great deal of the content for the site herself.

The fourth of five siblings, faith was part of family life where she grew up in Hodderston, Hertfordshire. Her parents became members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in her early years and her first experiences of the faith were "vibrant, alive and enthusiastic". As a result her siblings are still very much involved in the Church and she grew up in "a very positive faith-filled environment". Later, while at university in Leicester, where she read English and Psychology, she found herself drawn to evangelism.

"I'm not sure that I actually knew what that meant," she says. "I had a real passion for sharing the Gospel in my own little way. I wasn't formally in an evangelisation team or anything though I was part of a Bible study group at university. Most of my friends were not Christian, and it was through the day-to-day of living my faith and how it affected my lifestyle that people started to ask questions. I was answering questions and offering to pray for people so it was very much day-to-day evangelism. I began to want to do more and invest more. So at the end of university I was making decisions about my career. I felt very called into ministry of some sort."

She went to Ghana for five months, where she enrolled in a discipleship training school which involved four months of catechesis but also offered the time for prayer and reflection. It was in Ghana that she began to realise how much she still had to learn about the faith and upon her return entered the Sion Community, where she received strong training. Emily sees her catechesis is an ongoing process. She draws great strength from the Divine Office, which she says every day and from going to Mass.

"We have the opportunity to go to Mass every day and it's part of CASE's philosophy to have the Eucharist at the heart of all the work we do," she says.

As well as her degree in English and Psychology, Emily has a Masters in biblical studies and this shows when she describes her favourite part of Yfaith, namely the Bible page. "I had a wonderful time compiling the Bible page of the site," she says. "It's great to be able to get the chance to try and make these kids see that the Bible is a great adventure, that it's a fantastic book.

"We have a Bible detective club on the page, which is to challenge the kids to read their Bibles and engage with them. It sets them questions and challenges. My favourite question on the page: 'How many times is cheese mentioned in the Old Testament?' It's such a great question."