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Holy Week Ideas, Part I: Palm Sunday

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palm-sundayProcession:

If you have a live donkey, encourage children to invite friends to come to Palm Sunday.  The donkey can be a real selling point, and allow children who might otherwise be shy a way in to asking friends to church.

If you don’t have a live donkey, spend your children’s time this Sunday making a banner, or donkey puppets, or posters (which you can then laminate and put on sticks to make placards) or something else, for children to carry or use in the procession.

Buy real palms, not just palm crosses.  The fun of waving around big branches adds a real element of participation and excitement to this festival.  And they’re not that expensive.  If you have a large church garden, or parishioners with large gardens, you could ask people to bring in a branch or two from whatever shrubs or small trees they have, or provide branches from the church garden.

 

Storytelling:

The Passion reading is very dramatic, but many churches stick to the traditional way of reading it – a few adults standing in a line at the front.

With an hour’s rehearsal, the adults can dramatise it – act it out, use simple costume pieces – or with a bit more time, you could include children.

Include the congregation as the crowd and the soldiers. The drama of going, in half an hour, from shouting “hosanna!” to shouting “crucify him!” is incredibly powerful, and underlines the culpability of all of us in the death of Jesus. It wasn’t a few specific people in a faraway time who bear the guilt of his death – it’s the sin we all share.

 

Music:

Many churches will be singing “All Glory, Laud, and Honour” – the chorus is easy to learn, and allows children to participate more fully in the procession. Take some time the week before, or a few minutes at the start of your procession, to teach the chorus so children can sing it with the rest of the congregation.

 

Holy-Week-Box-all-contents-inside-300x300Take-home:

Send home materials for the Holy Week Box, a wonderful way of extending children’s exploration of the story at home throughout the week.

Pray and Play

Published on by stalbanscme1 Comment

Many churches have children’s corners.  It’s hard for little ones to sit still for the whole of a 1-hour service, or to come back in from a Sunday School session where they were allowed to move and play, and suddenly be expected to sit quietly in a pew.

This can mean children get restless and fussy, and parents end up taking them out. Parents feel embarrassed, both parents and children miss out on the service, and worship can get disrupted by a large-scale tantrum.  Not good.  By providing a children’s corner, where parents can take their children at the first sign of restlessness, this escalation can be largely prevented.  (Though kids will sometimes kick off regardless – it helps if it’s a vicar or churchwarden’s kid, so other parents feel more relaxed about their own.)

It’s easy to make the children’s corner just an ordinary secular playspace, but with a slight change in mindset, this can actually be turned into an opportunity for developing children’s spirituality.

Here’s one I made earlier …  the “Pray and Play” space at St. George’s Church, Campden Hill, London. Each basket is themed.  We have Baptism, Christmas, and Easter, as well as a Noah’s Ark with animals, a book corner, and a small toy altar with liturgical items and a toy church.

The focus is both on the Christian STORY and on Christian WORSHIP.

You can see how the colour of the cloth on the altar shows the liturgical year (except for when we lost our cloths and had all blue for a while while we replaced them!), and how extra items are sometimes added at festivals.

There’s a poster of the Good Shepherd on the wall, and the altar is visible from the Pray and Play area, so children and their adults can still feel connected to the worship.

The treasure boxes contain items similar to the Spiritual Child Network’s liturgy boxes.

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This one was used as a “Meditation Tent” in a Holiday Club in Nottinghamshire, and therefore can be more of a roped-off space than one used during corporate worship. This allows for fantastic creativity in terms of lighting and the overall atmosphere of the space.  Note the sign, which reads, “slip off your shoes and lay down your phone, for you are entering sacred ground.”  This one would work really well for older children and teens.

You can see more of the Meditation Tent here.

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The rug here really reflects a lot of Biblical landscapes (they’re from IKEA).  Note the pillow on top of the purple cushions – it has a heart and hands, which is great for cuddling, and which echoes the imagery of God used in the Beulah Land storytelling sets.  The table and chairs provide space for creative work – make sure you provide materials allowing for open-ended creation and not just colouring sheets.  The coat hanger features Bible-based story sacks, with storybooks and toys connected to that story.  Also note the vicar doll!  The child is playing with a wooden ark, just visible to the right of her.

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pray-and-play10This was a special installation for Pentecost.  Its creator says, “in MY head the doll’s house was meant to be the upper room in this case, but with children it could become anyyhing in their heads! It’s also been house-with-stable for Christmas, wedding feast house for water into wine, anyone’s house when we talked about hospitality and sharing things in common…quite versatile!”

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The image below shows how baskets can be used to encourage play based around worship as well as stories.  The coloured ribbons can be changed according to the season of the year.  For more ideas on children’s area, see the Spiritual Child Network’s page on them.  (Wooden egg cups make very good play chalices, by the way!)

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I’m getting lots of pictures sent through with many more ideas, so keep checking back for more!

In the meantime, if you’re thinking of setting up a Pray and Play area in your church, and you’d like some help – either in what to include or how to do it without scaring your congregation and starting World War III, do get in touch via cme@stalbans.anglican.org or on our Facebook page!