Christmas 3 – Sensory Christmas

The final post in the Christmas series.

Each year at our church we try to approach Christmas from a different viewpoint and bring this into the services and other activities.  This viewpoint is our Christmas theme and means that we can include different aspects in our Christmas teaching and events. Previous years have included “Imagine yourself in the nativity” and “Imagine the nativity in your world”, for this one the Churches Advertising Network was a great link, the poster being a great visual for this - Christmas 2009 Blog Post.

This year we did something that we’ve been building up to and follows on from previous years.  The focus this year was on the journey.  We were looking at the journeys made to the stable and then home, and what journeys we take from the nativity.  This was reflected in our children’s nativity, looking into the different journeys taken by the people in the Christmas story.

But the focus that this blog post is really about was our sensory stations that were laid around the church. The church was open for two hours, one in the morning and one in the evening.  During that time anyone and everyone were welcome to come to the church and take a journey (or even all three). The church was laid out with three journeys, Mary & Joseph, Shepherds and Wise Men. Each journey was laid out with different footsteps and each journey had 4-7 stations. Each station gave something to reflect on that would relate to something that person experienced in the Christmas story, for example the wise men meeting Herod, Mary and Joseph going on their journey, experiencing tiredness and other strains that relate to being on a journey. There are a couple of station examples at the end.

My priority when creating a sensory station place is to have something for children as well as adults to do at each station. This might be something to think about but it generally involves having something to do, e.g. making a person out of playdough who has helped you with your journey with Jesus. At another station break a glowstick and keep it to remind you that Jesus is the light of the world and is with you always. At a wise men based journey station smell some oils of frankincense and myrrh to think about the gifts the wise men brought to Jesus.  Having stations with things like this also means adults can try both and don’t just have to look at things deeply but sometimes see the journeys in simple ways.

The three journeys ended at the manger. This was a chance to sit in the nativity and imagine Jesus as a baby, a baby born like us all.

A station idea like this isn’t something most churches can do all the time but it is a great chance to give people different ways to pray, different things to consider when it comes to a story they may have heard many times before. We learn, pray and communicate differently and this is a chance to let people do that.  It is something that is difficult to describe to people but if done in different ways and linked in with services or other church events can encourage a variety of people to come.

Again our Christmas events were hampered by the weather but it did mean that people had to make difficult journeys of their own that week and related to all we were trying to share in our Christmas at church.

 

Station Examples

Station Shepherds 3

You are getting closer to the manger where Jesus was born now. While shepherds were waiting on the hill many angels joined with the angel Gabriel and together they sang praises to God. "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favour rests."There are people today who still write and sing songs to God, praising what he has done. Take this moment as you reflect on the experiences of the shepherds to listen to one of the songs on the CD player. A song that sings of the joy of a baby being born that will change the world. There are words if you want to read them.

Children: You are getting closer to the manger where Jesus was born now. While shepherds were waiting on the hill many angels joined with the angel Gabriel and together they sang praises to God. Listen to the song on the CD as you imagine the angels singing to God. Think of the joy they are sharing.

Station Shepherds 4

After the shepherds met with Mary, Joseph and Jesus they went and told people. They couldn’t keep the news to themselves. It is said that they spread the word and the people they told were amazed. The story for the shepherds didn’t end there. After they had told people they returned, they glorified and praised God for all that they had seen and heard. You will see that on one of the walls there is a wall for prayer. Is there someone you would like to hear the good news of Jesus or is there something you want to praise God for? Add it to the praise wall.

Children: After the shepherds met with Mary, Joseph and Jesus they went and told people. They were so excited they couldn’t keep the news to themselves. Is there something you want to say thank you to God for? Write it down or draw it on the paper praise wall.

Christmas 2 – Holiday Club

This is part of my Christmas series, talking about the things we did at church this Christmas that were a little more interesting or different than the things we normally do.

We do an Easter, Christmas and summer holiday club every year with another church. We do similar things every year – games, singing, crafts, God slots, etc.  This year at Christmas we decided to do things a little bit different.

We included some games and crafts and singing but we built it around something more special. Over the course of the morning we put on a nativity.

As the children arrived they could decide who they wanted to be. If we had 50 Mary’s that was okay because we would make it work. In school plays and the variety of nativity’s, children tend to be told what part they’re going to play. Then one day you end up speaking to a group of adults and if they have been in any sort of nativity you can easily have a conversation of “I never got to be…”. I've heard this from a variety of people, “I never got to be Mary because I was blonde”, “I never got to be a wise man, I was always the donkey”, etc. So we let the children be whoever they wanted to.  As it happened we ended up with about 8 wise men, many donkeys and no Joseph, but we made it work.

Doing a nativity in this way creates problems with costumes because you don’t know how many wise men outfits you need until the children come and you can’t have some costumes better than others because that creates many issues on it’s own. So we made it possible. I collected all the costumes at a pound shop, buying different coloured plastic bags to represent different characters. Blue for Mary, green for shepherds, purple for wise men, etc. When the time came we cut the bottoms off the bags and tied other plastic bags around the waists for belts or used other to made capes or headscarves. But we had to distinguish between angels and sheep so during one of the craft sessions we made bits to go with the costumes - sheep tails, donkey masks and headdresses, angel wings, shepherd crooks, wise men crowns. During another craft session we made the props and other bits – wise men gifts, a manger, extra cardboard sheep and a chance to paint a nativity backdrop (an idea I stole from our messy church session – see Christmas post number 1).

The children could choose to do the different crafts each session, bits for their own costumes and then do any other bits of the crafts or anything extra they wanted.

During the morning we learnt a song that we sang during the nativity, did a practise and played some of our usual games while also learning about the nativity story as there would be some children who might not know it.

We invited parents to join us for the last 15minutes of the holiday club to watch the nativity. It was a very simple nativity, with a narrator (a role I took for myself) reading out the lines the children with those parts had to repeat.  Actions and stage directions were also read out as part of the narrator role (e.g. “Then Mary and Joseph sat down and the shepherds sat behind them”). As you can imagine there were some amusing moments, but you always need those in a nativity, maybe it made it more authentic...

It was a fantastic holiday club (hampered only by some major snowfalls which meant some children couldn’t come) and gave us a chance to invite parents and share the Christmas story with them.

Christmas 1 – Messy Church

This Christmas at church we decided to try something new with our children.  We have good work with the children who come to the church and even with the groups we have associated with, e.g. holiday clubs, junior youth group but we don’t have much of a connection between the two.  One of the reasons for this is that many of the fringe groups we have happen with another church, we run our holiday club with them.  This way we can talk about all the services going on but we can’t really overtly push what happens at the church where I would as these things are shared.

So how could we change this?  And what could we do with a virtually full calendar?

We also wanted to do something that got all ages involved. I would love to do a once a month all age service but with all the different things going on in our services it again becomes difficult, we have found other ways of making parts of our services have all age content and also doing a breakfast club once a month. But it would still be great to do an all age thing, something people would be comfortable inviting others to, something where people can meet others, feel relaxed and not worry too much if their children can’t sit still.

So what combines all those things and would be great for a Christmas event?

Messy Church!

So we started on the long journey of preparing for Messy Church. As with all programs in church work you make it fit yourself and that is what we did for messy church.  We combined it with our junior youth group, Transformers.  We made it part of a big Christmas end of term celebration.  We added carols, a sketch, a talk and of course audience participation – something we normally have at the end of our Transformers evening session.

We combined this with games and crafts as people arrived.  Trying to add a mixture of general Christmas games – get the pretend snowball into the bucket, guess the Christmas film - with games with a nativity link – pin the tail on the donkey, anagrams of Christmas story words and a variety of other games. There were also crafts, things that could be used in the worship – create a prayer bauble, paint a nativity picture and things the children could take home – Christmas cards, decorate candles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was an opportunity before worship to dress the Christmas tree from a box of decorations. The children could put them where they liked and again all ages were together. This was followed by our time of worship and then a meal together.

The fantastic part of this messy church event was there was a mixture of our usual families, excited children, toddlers and older people, families who had never come to our church for anything before except to drop their children off at Transformers and others.

There is one thing to remember when doing your own Messy Church. It is messy! And it is meant to be messy.

We can look at our churches and worry what some may say if it gets covered in glue and glitter but even if it takes two and a half hours to clear up (which it did) we can remember that this is an exciting time for the children and their families, a time to have lots of fun, get messy, fell part of what is around you and do it all together.

Messy Church went really well. There was some great feedback from children and adults and even siblings who couldn’t be there getting jealous because their little sister couldn’t stop talking about how good it was and all the things they did. I would recommend it to any church who wanted to try something new. We will definitely be doing another one in Spring term 2011.