easter 2015

These are some thoughts I've had after our first couple of months with a Play and Pray area in our worship space. This experience has been with a small group of children aged about 3-6. Advice for parents Remind your children ahead of time about expected behavior.   This may vary from church to church. I ask children to keep their voices down to an absolute whisper except when the congregation is singing (or passing the Peace). Apart from Communion, I ask them to stay in the Play and Pray area (and to move slowly and quietly). Come a little early.  Your child might well want to share some news with me, or make small talk. This is easier to do before the service has started. Coming early also allows the child time to orient themselves and settle down. (If you come too early, though, we might not have finished setting up yet!) Leave your child's own toys at home. We have selected the Play and Pray materials with care. Just as our worship space is not like your living...

Yesterday we weren't sure whether any children would come to church (one family is away, another had only just returned from holidays and were jet-lagged), and then we found out at very short notice that "our" chapel was in use by another priest so we were moved elsewhere. Vandriver and I managed to dash in just in time to grab a few things from the storage cupboard (located *in* the chapel) to carry to our temporary location, and I set up and then sat within a scaled-down Play and Pray area anyway, just in case any children did come. location as usual, just behind the first row on "the Gospel side" Happily, two showed up. They had been away most of the summer and this was their first introduction to Play and Pray. Although I would say that on the whole things went well, the 4-year-old turned to me during the service and asked, When are we going to have Junior Church again? Caught off-guard, and needing to whisper, I answered non-committally. After the service, ...

(aka Adjusting Godly Play to Fit the Context!) Sheila, who blogs at Explore and Express , has been a guest blogger here before. I think we may be at the core of a sort of mutual admiration society. We are both ex-pats living in European countries, both discovered Godly Play here in Europe, and both brought it to our churches more or less single-handedly. In many ways, though, Sheila's managed to take it a good deal further than I have yet. She's taken it to schools and forests , she's done it in German and English and even in Russian . So when we first got the idea of trading guest posts (this was ages ago, because then we then got all caught up in the idea of an Eastertide guest post series and postponed these one-off posts for another time) , I asked if she'd write something about adapting Godly Play to different contexts. Thanks so much, Sheila, for all your encouragement and enthusiasm, and for writing this guest post for me. At school. Chameleons have always fasc...

I've written here about finding and purchasing my baptism doll, and her/his christening gown. (The doll is anatomically correct, but he/she wears bloomers so that children can decide for themselves what the doll is.) While at the same flea (super-)market last week, I bought another one for our Play and Pray area at church. This doll came  wearing a badly stained dress but since I wanted to get a christening gown, that didn't worry me at all. The doll was also  wearing a pair of white and pink shorts, which will be kept for now as an undergarment. This doll is a bit different than my first one - slightly smaller, mouth pursed for a bottle, one tuft of hair on the forehead, and a little more ambiguous anatomically. I didn't take time to hunt right through the market for the "best" doll (it's an ongoing struggle for me to curb my perfectionist and "maximizer" tendencies), but chose this from among three dolls at the same stall. This one was simply the ...

In the (church) news this week in Finland is the singing of a Finnish song by the Taiz� community at Evening Prayer on Saturday . Many Taiz� chants have been translated into Finnish, and sung by Finnish speakers at Taiz�, but this is the first time they have used a chant which was composed in Finnish from the start. The words of the song are from Psalm 119:105: Sanasi on lamppu, valo askeleillani . The literal translation into English is "Your word is a lamp, a light to my feet". Yep, English takes twice as many words to say this as Finnish does.   Taiz� evening prayers are broadcast weekly by the Cathedral in Cologne / K�ln (scroll down the left sidebar and click on the service for the date 14/07 - or I think this link might take you straight there ). The song comes about six minutes into the broadcast (06.25, if you want to jump straight to it).  photo of Taiz� prayers by " sasa1976 " *     *     *     *     * If you'd like to take...

I'm aware that my posting has slowed down a lot recently. I so appreciated Leslie's recent comment  saying that she was behind in her blog reading - at least that was one person who hadn't been frustratedly checking in here asking themselves whether I was ever going to post again! On Sunday I carried out an assignment relating to my ordination training - to construct a creative liturgy, appropriate to your own denomination for a main service . I chose the theme of "Salvation History", drawing upon the set reading of Ephesians 1:3-14. At two points I tried to involve the children in using fabric to change the atmosphere:   I asked them to help me swathe the congregation in dark blue tulle to represent the chaos and waters spoken of in Genesis 1 so that  we could meditate upon the time before Creation (Eph 1: 3-6) and  later to lay down strips of sparkly golden material under people's feet, representing the heavenly streets of gold (Rev 21),  for a reflection up...