easter 2015

As I mentioned in my last blog post , today is Annunciation Day - when we remember the Angel Gabriel's visit to Mary and Mary's acceptance of God's call on her. Yesterday I made a brief visit to an after-school centre run for first- and second-graders so they won't be at home alone while their parents are at work. I noticed that they seemed to have a little worship area! It looked similar to a prayer table in a Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium. I was also interested because in my Church of England theological studies we just recently been learning about the requirements for "collective worship" in English schools. I asked a few questions of the child I was visiting, but in my excitement I asked too many  yes/no  questions and too few open-ended questions. *sigh* Still, what I've understood is that they have a little worship time almost every day. It includes a Bible story and a prayer (at least). The current theme clearly was the Annunciation. The wh...

In the sermon slot today, I read a story to the congregation. Do any of you recognize the book? Or can you guess what I might have been reading today? Tuesday will be the 25th, nine months before Christmas, which makes it Annunciation Day. The Finnish Lutherans celebrate it on the nearest Sunday. It's a six-candle day! I read the story of the Annunciation (and Mary's Visitation to Elizabeth) as told by Madeleine L'Engle in The Glorious Impossible , with illustrations by Giotto . Any fully-equipped Godly Play classroom will have at least some of the illustrations from this book among the materials for The Mystery of Christmas , and some also have a copy of the full book as well. It was a little clumsier than I expected to try to hold the book so people could see it and read at the same time... especially to swivel back and forth so everyone had the opportunity to see! But it was fun to glance up at the congregation from time to time (something I do not do as a Godly Play sto...

A project I have underway is the creation of a set of cards for the books of the Bible. I am making this for one of our godsons, since he is at an age where he is very interested in collecting cards with bits of information on them - cards for the Magic game , for example (or baseball cards, to use an example I find easier to relate to!).  I plan to use a second set as part of the materials for the Godly Play enrichment lesson about the Books of the Bible. I used the Keynote software (similar to Powerpoint) to design them, then printed and laminated them. The face of each card shows two pictures representing stories from the book (using the wonderful resource of  Bible illustrations  from  Sweet Publishing ), and the Gospels also show the symbols associated with each evangelist (with Luke's symbol repeated on the Acts card). Each card also has a quote from the book, a single phrase which sums up something distinctive or important about the contents. Today I delivere...

Yesterday it struck me that the pastor and I hadn't discussed which of us might provide a children's sermon, if needed, for our service that afternoon. Inspired by Sheila's good reports of The Mystery of Easter, I rushed a cross puzzle into production. Before I began, I read the script (from The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Vol. 4 )   onto a recording which I then listened to as I worked. Once I'd finished, I listened once or twice more while I physically acted out the lesson, moving the pieces around, and finally tried it without the recording, speaking the script myself. Way back in training we tried that, having one person read the script while another moved the pieces, but I'd never tried using a recording of myself for practice before! The materials were far from ideal. I cut a cross out of cardboard packing material from our recycling pile. Having no paint to hand, I used magazine clippings of purple on one side, and white felt on the other. Lessons learned?...