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Category: Children’s Work

Play Church | All Age Worship With Toddlers

This is an idea I have shamelessly stolen from @revleahvs.  Play is such an important part of learning.  One Sunday night I watched a ten year old from Holy Nativity put her arms up in the air and recount the words of invitation I use at the eucharist.  We learn through playing.  So we now have six toddler churches.

Cheap plastic boxes with with a laminated card on the top.

Fairtrade dolls that come in a range of races and gender.

Vestments made from felt I bought in the range.

Egg cup, castor cup and electric tea lights from ebay.Laminated Lord’s Prayer.

Holding cross and psalm 23 on a card from ebay.

Hankerchief folded as a corporal from ebay.

So lets play church.  Lets learn the faith as we play with it.

Stars in the Sky

The lectionary text this morning was Genesis 12:1-4.  This is the passage where God makes a promise to Abram that he will have descendants as numerous as the stars.

So I took a trip to The Range. This is my regular Saturday afternoon haunt when prepping for Church on Sunday morning.  To make our starry sky, the background was made from A1 blue card, A1 black paper and pritt-stick.

During the opening songs, the youglings cut out equilateral triangles of yellow paper with 3″ sides. Then during the teaching, each member of the congregation folded them into stars.  We put our initials on them as an act of commitment as the people of God.  We then used sticky foam dots (the range is great) to add them to the sky.

A member of our community died this week.  One of the most poignant moments was when his widow and I put his initials onto a star and added it with the rest of us as the people of God.

You don’t get the text of my sermon to go with it as for all age worship I didn’t have a text – RE teacher skills.  You’ll have to write your own. Sorry.

DIY Prayer Dice

As we have journeyed together through lent as a community at Holy Nativity, people have been asking how we can grow as disciples.  One thing I keep being asked about is prayer.  There is a universal truth about all people who believe;  every single one of us thinks we’re rubbish at praying.  By listening to what people are asking I have been developing different ways of helping people to pray.  So during the parade service yesterday morning, we made giant prayer dice.  And this is how we did it.

Last week I went to eBay and bought 50mm wooden craft blocks.  You can buy as many or as few as you need and as we’re a small community I bought enough for everyone in the congregation.

The scouts handed them out to everyone.  As we passed them around we talked as a congregation about what prayer is.  I led the conversations and asked what we would like to pray about.  As the conversation progressed we wrote them onto the dice.

We came up with:

Friends, Family, Ourselves, Thanksgiving, Saying Sorry, The World

Then I asked about how to begin a prayer.  As a congregation we discussed names for God.

And then we talked about the word “especially”.  We talked about how if we rolled our dice and prayed “Father I pray for the world.  Especially I pray for…” it opens up into a whole conversation.  And then we discussed the importance of listening to the other side of the conversation during prayer.  What is God saying to us about those places in the world we’re praying for?  What is God saying to us about the homeless people in Halifax?  What is God saying back to us in the conversation we started with a little block of wood about our family and friends?

And that’s how we do sermons together at Holy Nativity.