Advent Resources

A few helpful places to go for ideas for Advent and preparation for Christmas:

Celebrating Advent in the Home: lovely simple leaflet with daily advent readings, and a liturgy for candle lighting. Also some good resources on a Jesse tree and Advent Wreaths. Excellent.

Christmas Wrapped Up and More Christmas Wrapped Up: a couple of volumes of resources produced by Scripture Union, with dramas, readings, word searches, craft activities, and a whole host of other things. Almost impossible not to find something useful.

Barnabas in Churches Ideas Page: a great selection of resources on the Chrisitan year, as well as a host of other themes, posted by a collection of folk around the country.

A Holy Christmas positively heaving with links to advent and Christmas resources, some links now out of date, but an incredible collection.

Advent Wreath prayers from the CofE liturgical commission.

Childrens colouring pages & wordsearches. Quite remarkable to find a US site which was offering this stuff for free. Seriously.

ReJesus have some online meditations.

The Churches Advertising network has a couple of good radio ads to go with the excellent nativity cartoon they created.

Visuals
Silent Night by John Birch, available to download from Proost
Advent Meditation, discovered via Bishop Alans sidebar.
Video and photo resources from Reelworship. Simple but good quality.
Big collection of sites doing graphics for worship (plus a whole lot else) here, but most of them will charge you. See comment above!
Dave Walker Christmas themed cartoons.

or for something completely different, go to Creative Prayer, which has bags of ideas for interactive prayer stations. Couldn't find much that was directly to do with advent, but that's not going to stop me recommending it.

Finally previous advent resources posts, there's a bit of overlap between them.

Messy Church goes online

Great news: Messy Church now has a website.

Messy Church is what it says on the tin: a form of all-age church which involves plenty of mess, but which is ideally suited for running midweek, Saturday afternoons, after school etc. The 'normal' format includes a craft/activity/play time where parents and carers get stuck in playing with their kids, then a short time of worship, then a meal together. Several churches are picking this up as a monthly outreach, and it's been quite effective in reaching people who normally don't go to Sunday worship. "I don't see it as a stepping stone into Sunday services... it needs to be valid in its own right."

The website has ideas for services, lists of who's trying 'Messy Church', training events, and is a networking site for people who are trying it. One of the holy grails of Fresh Expressions of church is a way of 'doing church' which can be replicated in various settings without masses of effort. It's very hard going completely back to the drawing board with every new form of Christian community, mission or worship.

There's also a book (pictured), details via the website, or via Barnabas in Churches.

Family Services

Fascinating discussion thread on Family Services/All-Age worship opened up by Dave Walker, yielding a completely unscientific, but very educational cross-section of opinion. Commenter 11 does a good job of getting the debate back on track, but it's worth reading, just for people's insights and reactions.

A helpful place to go is Barnabas in Churches (not to be confused with the Barnabas Fund, who campaign on behalf of the persecuted church). Here's their checklist:

1. What to avoid?
All-age worship is not …
- entertainment
- a potpourri of contributions
- just for the children; or just for the adults
- just for the outsider or the insider
- a Sunday school with adults present
- a standard service but with children present

2. What do we need?
for all-age learning…
- involvement, inclusion, intelligible language
- all the senses, all the richness of our world-wide faith
- one theme, explored throughout, in short sections
- group work, questions, stories for all-age worship…
- welcome and wonder
- sign and symbol
- patterns and a programme
- space and silence
- image and imagination
- rhythms and rhyme

3. What elements should we try to include?
- story… interaction… question and answer…
- celebration of community ( laughter and lament )…
- different voices… pictures… silence
- movement… involvement of the five senses…
- celebration of faith in action…
- short sections…
- accessible language … time to respond to God…
- space for wonder…
- a clear framework using familiar signpost language from the usual liturgy of your church, such as the Welcome, the Lord’s Prayer, Responses, Reading, Prayers, Communion Words, Blessing
- a variety of styles of hymns and songs, carrying the theme

Which actually all sounds to me like good practice in worship anyway, whether there are children present or not.