easter 2015

The Godly Play lesson of the Circle of the Church Year presents a concept which I had never heard before - that just as Advent helps us get ready for Christmas and Lent for Easter, so Eastertide helps us get ready for Pentecost. Eastertide is simultaneously a time of celebration and a time of preparation. Preparation through celebration - what a gorgeous thought. I have heard people puzzle or even fret over the fact that Advent is not a season of fasting nowadays. But the folks at Busted Halo revel in the richness of the differences between Advent and Lent:  Advent is about Hope, not Repentance , they say .  And how delicious it is to think that we prepare for Pentecost with celebration. Sheila (of Explore and Express ) and I have celebrated Eastertide this year with a series of guest posts. Our final one is coming soon, but in the meantime I'd like to share a photograph from my friend, "see-through faith". In addition to her regular blog she has a photo blog , where h...

Thanks to the several of you who have commented on my post-about-not-doing-any-more-Godly-Play-for-the-foreseeable-future , or written emails. I am fine. In fact, writing that post really seemed to help me process my feelings (as did packing the room up so slowly and then walking home). I want to reiterate that I was as much to blame as anyone else for the lack of communication involved. And I alone was to blame for not anticipating  (the extent of) the emotional impact that our plans (to be away for the coming year) would have on me. And I am solely, exclusively, and certainly to blame for the way in which I seem to be unable to write about this without using really convoluted syntax and roundabout phrasings! I'm very grateful for the support of commenters, emailers, and lurkers alike (since you lurkers are not completely hidden - I can see reports of the number of hits my site has received). I have no immediate plans for much topical shift in this blog. The pa...

This post's author is Margaret Pritchard Houston, Families Pastor for St. George's Church, Campden Hill (in Kensington, in London ). As well as writing about children's ministry for the Church of England and Diocese of London, she maintains a blog about her work at St. George's: For All the Saints . If you follow that blog already, you'll have seen her photo of the St. George's Play and Pray area on Easter Sunday this year (I've reproduced it here, on the right.) Is your eye, like mine, immediately drawn to that Easter image of Christ victorious standing before Martha at the empty tomb? These are not the flannel-graph materials from the Sunday School of my childhood. So I asked Margaret to introduce them and give us a feel for what it's like to work with them. I need to begin with a confession.  This is not an entirely objective review � my mother developed the Beulah Land storytelling materials, and I grew up using them, travelling with her to worksho...

A couple of days ago, one of the others who leads Junior Church texted me to ask if I'd be able to lead this week (I was away last week because of a funeral). I said yes. After church we held an informal "Gathering" at which we discussed upcoming plans, including the future of Junior Church. [Vandriver and I expect to be abroad during the upcoming academic year, and I am the only [adult] Godly Play enthusiast in our congregation (Seethroughfaith being in England at present).] photo from Beulah Enterprises I suggested that the others consider two solutions (or a third option, which would be a combination of the first two). One is the Beulah Land curriculum ( the subject of our next guest post ). The other is to not have any separate Junior Church program, but to set up a " Play and Pray " area during our regular services ( here's a good description of the sort of thing I have in mind , and here's my account of the one time we've tried something like t...

This week I've attended the funeral of the man I wrote about in this post . Like Sarah and then Abraham, he died old and full of years, with family to remember him with stories and love while committing his body back to the dust. Sheila and I have agreed to delay this week's guest post until Sunday. See you then !

I have deliberately scheduled this post to be published some time after it was written, to give it more anonymity.  (preparing the Communion Elements on the Focal Shelf) We always have two adults present at our Godly Play sessions, usually only two but always at least two. And usually between two and six children. Together we form the circle, have a lesson and Response Time, then clean up and have our feast. It is usually sometime during the feast that the priest arrives, and when we have finished eating the Godly Play feast the priest gives communion to the adults and individual blessings to the children. Then we sing a song of blessing and the children leave to join their parents at Church Coffee. This week my adult helper asked the priest if it would be all right to receive a blessing rather than the wafer and wine. The helper explained to me afterwards, It felt wrong to take it again. Because for me today our feast WAS communion! (napkins for a feast during the Great Green Grow...

Featherglen came up trumps for our (Sheila's and my) Eastertide Guest Post series with not one but two blog posts. I introduced her in yesterday's post, about her Eastertide garden . Today she shares several ways of telling and remembering the story of the Emmaus Road. I appreciate how sensitive she is to the context of worship - the community, the physical location, the resources available. It's wonderful that she's included so many photos (please honor her request, "If you want to use any of them, please be lovely enough to ask me first."). I took the liberty of re-arranging them slightly, dividing the post into an introduction and then three sections. Although all the accounts of the Resurrection are amazing, one that I particularly love is the appearance of Jesus to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Yes, it is strange that they don't recognise Him - but then they aren't expecting him either - somehow He is the same but different - that'...

This week's guest is " Featherglen ", one of the early participants in our Lenten link-up . She and her husband both work as members of the L'Arche community in Inverness. Her sidebar list of topics shows her major concerns to be her faith, her family, handicrafts, and the L'Arche Community. Featherglen's life sounds very romantic - living in the Scottish Highlands, married to a French jeweller and gardener, members of an international movement building faith-based communities with people with learning disabilities, supporting them to reach their full potential ... yet her writing is honest and down-to-earth. As a mother, member of a L'Arche Community and a church, Lent can, ironically, turn into a very full time. Although this is usually in a good way, by the time Easter has arrived and been celebrated in various ways, I'm ready for a break. However, despite not growing up in a liturgical tradition, I have grown to appreciate many aspects of such...

photo by Markus This week's guest post is in German! Fortunately, Sheila has translated it into English for us. The writer is Markus, of the Gott im Spiel - Godly Play blog . Having him as a guest blogger reminds us that there are men out there, as well as women, leading Godly Play ( David Pritchard is another male writer blogging about Godly Play), and also   that Godly Play crosses denominational lines (as I have said here ). Markus works in the Roman Catholic church. His blog includes simply beautiful photographs, but Google's machine-translations of his posts are often tantalizingly bizarre: When fathoming it was a boy, the Holy Family so on and found this: Mary and Joseph standing with his back to the crib. (from the post " Jesus in der Pubert�t ") At the end of a picture ensteht with a steel end "sun" from the twelve brauenn felt strips (previously the house in Jerusalem was praying in the imaginary), at the ends and around which the shields and symbo...

I wanted to introduce this week's guest post in part by referencing the blogger's denominational identity [Roman Catholic]. But I started including so many links that it was going to distract from the guest post! You might remember that my guest blogger three weeks ago was a Methodist , and that my congregation is pastored by Lutherans and Anglicans. Did you also know that my sidebar includes blogs by  Baptists ,  Episcopalians , and the Spanish national children's ministry co-ordinator for the  Scripture Union ? That the Director of Training for the Godly Play Foundation was a  Quaker (Society of Friends) ? That before Jerome W. Berryman was ordained an Episcopal priest he was a  Presbyterian minister ? We Godly Play folk are a diverse bunch!