A weekly blog of Creative Ideas for Leading Worship
Visualising the Church Year
As worship leaders, planning services week by week, we are always conscious of which season of the Church Year we are in. But the children and adults in our congregations may not be.
Here’s a simple and fun way to explore this.
(I ran this activity some years ago when we were having services in our church hall while the church building was being earthquake strengthened.)
Create cards or labels (say 4 labels each of 4 A4 sheets, which you then cut up: Download PDF here) that name the key events and festivals in the church year:
1. Advent
2. Christmas
3. Epiphany
4. Transfiguration
5. Lent
6. Palm Sunday
7. Good Friday
8. Easter Sunday
9. Ascension
10. Pentecost
11. Trinity Sunday
12. Ordinary Time
13. Season of Creation
14. More Ordinary Time
15. Christ the King
(If other events in the church calendar are important in your tradition, add them in the appropriate place in the sequence.)
Invite the children, and as many adults as are required to make a total of 15 people, up to the front. Give them each a label to hold and display in front of them.
Ask the person holding the Advent label to come forward and have them stand on the left hand side of the sanctuary/space. Then ask the person holding the Christmas label to come forward and stand just on the right of the first person.
In this way work through all 15 labels and create a line of people across the sanctuary, standing in chronological order of the Church Year from left to right.
Briefly describe what happened in the Bible at each step and how we celebrate this in church.
Then ask the people holding labels to stay in the same order and form a big circle, so that Advent is standing next to Christ the King. Tell everyone that the Church Year is a repeating cycle.
Our congregation enjoyed this exercise. Let me know in the comments section how your congregation respond.
Ngā mihi
Philip
1 comment
What a great visual activity!