Pentecost is May 31st! It is the birthday of the church and it is a day of great celebration.
You may want to rename this “Pentecost in a Box” or “Pentecost in a Bag”. Mina Munns, Priest in Charge and Pioneer Minister – Parish Churches of Cresswell and Lynemouth, Church of England is the author of this particular version of this idea.
Are you looking for intergenerational worship centers that get all ages to think and become active with their faith? Well, I have a source to share that we tried out at Columbia Theological Seminary a week ago that was a success.
Our story is so common, a 125 year old congregation, inner-city, wants to minister to the community around it, I’m sure you have heard it all before.
The Facts:
Our average attendance: 170ish
Average Sunday school was: 30ish (all in, all ages)
Most families attended once a month
We have a separate family chapel, attended by substantially more persons than Sunday school hour.
Our take away was that families are interested, but not in our traditional model.
We kept coming back to the old adage “it takes a village…”
Today for many of our sisters and brothers from the eastern hemisphere is the Lunar New Year celebration. I was blessed to be invited to a celebration yesterday by one of our students, Loann Nguyen, to her church, Faith Vietnamese Baptist Church, and was struck by the intergenerational activities that were a part of their celebration of this holiday. Continue reading
I wrote the Christmas Participation Story over 20 years ago. When I was a student at The Presbyterian School of Christian Education, one of my textbooks was A Guide to Recreation, by Glenn Bannerman and Robert Fakkema. One of the activities in that book was a participation story with a “cowboy setting.” It was a popular activity but written in a period where inclusive language and political correctness had yet to develop. I really enjoyed the format, however and began to write similar stories based on biblical texts. I paraphrased the text into a storytelling format in which I repeated words and phrases throughout and assigned groups to respond with certain words, actions, inflections, volume etc. Continue reading
In their seminal work Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069, William Strauss and Neil Howe describe generations metaphorically as distinct trains carrying groups of like-minded people to stations that represent the different stages of life. For instance, today, the “Millennial” train is passing through the rising adulthood station and the “Generation X” train is passing through the midlife station. Strauss and Howe posit that each train looks different to observers as they come through each station because each generation has a distinct character.
Generation theory (and its precursors) has been around for a quarter-century now. Perhaps an older notion than that is the presumption of a “gap” between each generation that makes living together more difficult. This perception has been aided by a trend in American society toward age segregation over the last 100 years, with the youngest Americans receiving an education separate from adults, who are in the workplace, and separate from the oldest Americans, who are retired. That is a major shift from what was previously a largely agrarian society. Continue reading
We arrive at church for Sunday School early. While I assemble two large salads, my children set up for our feast. The scent of pizza wafts through the door ahead of the steaming boxes. People of all ages gather in a circle to share laughter, prayer, and grace. Tuesday Night Sunday School begins.
It started out as an experiment. Sunday School teachers were difficult to find. Parents were choosing between dropping children off for Sunday School and attending worship, as doing both seemed too time consuming. We wanted worship to be the family focus on Sundays.
Sunday School was banished from Sunday mornings, participation by parents or guardians insisted upon. Amidst skepticism from Church Council members, Tuesday Night Sunday School was born. Continue reading
Sunday school was working, but not well. It was bringing in the same folks
we would see for almost any other church gathering and very few of the folks
we only see at worship or for our Wednesday night LOGOS program. So we
decided to try something different.
Our Christian Education committee (through some weeping and gnashing of teeth on the part of some) decided to stop Sunday school and replace it with a program we call GIFT (which stands for Generations in Faith Together). The vision of GIFT is to get people of all generations (preschool, elementary, youth, college, young adult, middle aged, senior citizen, etc.) to gather for some sort of educational event once a month between September and April/May. Continue reading
The internet has ushered in a new way of doing almost everything, from shopping to research. Here at Practical Resources for Churches (PRC), we’ve seen an increase in the use of the internet in how we interact with people, provide resources, and offer learning and growth opportunities. Although we still offer face-to-face experiences through our workshops and roundtables, our webinar program is continually expanding. Continue reading
Here is something new that isn’t really all that new to “try” – biblical storytelling.
I am part of a liturgical biblical storytelling troupe, whose members “tell” the gospel story (or another of the lectionary text) each week during worship.
Biblical Storytelling is reclaiming the ancient practice- when most of the world was illiterate- of telling the stories of the bible. Biblical Storytelling is the rediscovered ancient art of oral performance of the scriptural text. It’s the way the stories of the bible were always intended to be heard — the way they always were heard before they were written down, and even for centuries after that. Continue reading
