It's been a busy old time at church. The run up to Christmas is busy for all and church is no exception.
We've had the usual children's groups, carol services and Christmas excitement. However, we have also had the church (and school) favourite Nativity.
This year we tried to go with the theme linking to the Christian Advertising Network who were using an image of the traditional Mary, Joseph and Jesus at the manger scene set in a modern day bus stop. It even had a Tesco carrier bag in it! The slogan was "Christmas starts with Christ", which didn't seem right for the picture but still important. Not only did we use this image in our church Christmas cards but we also decided to build on the theme for our nativity. So how did we do that?
We filmed the different readings in modern day, real places. So the wise men were at the bus station "Royal Well" for their first reading but for their second they were filmed at the train station, because they went back a different way. And the shepherds were on a hill, outside of our local town looking at the town. Unfortunately the sheep that are normally on the hill were missing but the noises were there (aided by our youth group).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v0cOBkW6hs
You can see the rest (there are 5 others) via my youtube channel:
So that was our nativity. However, the children also did their amazing part. They read, they sang, they dressed up and they got lots of smiles. The videos linked really well with the live action done by the children and the comments after were really positive. The videos were also used in the previous weeks of advent and were a great for creating a complete advent package and creating nativity service anticipation.
Who knows what we'll do next year? Maybe you can comment on how you did your nativity this year.
