Mothering Sunday – all age talk

Here’s something I did last year and which worked pretty well. But NB it only works in a church that would recognise what a chasuble is and in which the service is Eucharistic, so apologies if your church isn’t that kind of church or you’re not doing a Eucharistic service (and please do search ‘Mothering Sunday’ on this site for alternatives – there are quite a few I’ve posted). Anyway, if your church does do chasubles please read on…

Beforehand:
1. Ensure that you’ll be using the Exodus and John readings
2. Find an old (pale coloured) bedsheet, ideally one that’s not really manky – the perfect bedsheet for this is one with a coffee stain in the corner but which is otherwise still quite respectable. Fold it in half so the short edges meet and the long edges are halved. Cut out a poncho/chasuble shape complete with neck hole. You might need to hold it up against yourself to make sure it’s roughly the right size and shape. But it doesn’t have to be perfect.
3. Get hold of some sharpies or fabric pens, and make sure you have somewhere in church you can lay it down, unfolded. You might want to protect that surface with a plastic sheet or something in case the pens soak through.
4. Recruit someone to stand by the blank chasuble during the service, starting from when people come in – ideally this should be someone who knows your children and families and can get them involved. Tell your helper that when people arrive they can start writing and drawing on the chasuble words and pictures that they associate with mothering, on one half of the chasuble (ie either the front or the back of it). Give that person some hand gel that they can get everyone to use.
5. Recruit someone to do the intercessions that day who is able to respond pastorally and appropriately to anything difficult that emerges from the talk. Mothering Sunday is the worst day of the year for a lot of people…

In the service:
1. In the notices, encourage any families (or indeed anyone who likes doing stuff rather than listening to stuff) to go over to the chasuble area and the helper you have there will encouarge them to start decorating the chasuble once they’ve used the hand gel.
2. After the readings, encourage any families or others who like that sort of thing to go over to the chasuble and keep working on it while you all reflect together on what you’ve heard.
3. Ask the chasuble team what sorts of things are already on the chasuble – what have people written and drawn?
4. Look back at the readings, and see what you notice about mothering in the two stories, for example:
– mothering isn’t just about being a biological mother (there are four women who have a role in mothering the baby Moses; on the cross Jesus creates a new family) – this can be affirming for people who find mothering Sunday difficult because they feel that their own families are not ‘standard’.
– mothering often involves courage, cunning, sadness, ingenuity, improvisation, rebellion, solidarity, sorrow….
Ask your chasuble team to find ways to express these suggestions on the other half of the chasuble.
5. Draw attention to the wide range of gifts and feelings, and allow people if they wish to give voice to some of the really difficult aspects of mothering, and of being mothered. Is there room for these on the chasuble too? Reassure everyone that these are things that will be included in the prayers.
6. When the chasuble is decorated with all this, get the team to bring it forward, and either put it on yourself, or get someone else to put it on, so that everyone can see it – maybe even walk down the aisle and round the church. It will likely be both beautiful and chaotic. It will not be pefect. That’s OK. Thank the chasuble team – they can go and sit down now.
7. Some background for this next bit: my son when he was little always said ‘chasuble hugs are the best hugs because chasubles are like wings’. So at the end of each service I’d always wrap him in the biggest chasuble hug, and I’d tell him that it was like when Jesus described himself as a mother hen who wanted all her chicks tucked under her wings. When I did this talk last year, I had someone that I could hug to demonstrate this, but this year because of Coronavirus we’re not doing hugs, so here is my alternative:
Tell the congregation about Jesus being the mother hen – and you can tell them about what my son said, too, if you like. Suggest that the chasuble is a challenge for the church to see how the church can be a mother hen for people. At the moment hugging isn’t a thing we can do safely, in order to care for and protect one another. But there other ways that we can be a mother hen, and some of those ways are already written and drawn on the chasuble.
8. Get the congregation to suggest ways for us as a church community to be mother hens for one another and especially for the most vulnerable. Link to any initatives that the church is already taking. Let this take you into the creed (‘Let us stand and affirm in God, who made us and loves us and cares for us, in Jesus Christ, our mother hen, and in the Holy Spirit who wraps us in God’s love every day of our lives’ or whatever).
9. If you’re presiding, you can wear the chasuble for the rest of the service, or you someone else can.

Please feel free to adapt this to your circumstances – I’d love to know what you did differently and how it went, so please do leave a comment if you’d like to.

Preaching with All Ages

I got an opportunity to pull together some of the things I’ve been going on about for the last decade and make them into a book. I just got my author copies, so it must be real. The book is about reflective practice and preaching, particularly all age preaching. And it has pictures!

You can hear me talk about the book on this podcast, courtesy of the Church Times.

Sermon doodle: Jonah and the baptism of Christ

I don’t write a full script when I preach unless I have to, but I love to preach from some kind of mind map or picture-word combination.  As an experiment I neatened up one from last night to see if it would be a useful or beautiful thing for people to see.  The result is below.

The sermon drew on two artworks, also below (the first is from a stained glass window in Queen’s College Chapel, Oxford, and the second is a painting by Daniel Bonnell).

All Age All Saints

This activity works really well using Hebrews 11, but could also be adaopted for other passages that mention multiple people of God.
Prepare some coloured paper people, several per colour and write names on them as follows: 
Red: the heroes of the faith in Heb 11
Orange: the first disciples, St Paul etc
Yellow: early/mediaval saints
Green: reformation and modern saints
Blue: ‘those who have influenced us or shared the faith with us’ – may be generic or left blank
Purple: blank (you need as many of these as there are people in the congregation)
Pink or brown or grey: blank (again, as many as there are in the congregation, with some spares)
Write the names on the people and hide them round the church before the service.During the sermon, send children out to gather one colour at a time, and bring them forward – pin them or stick them to a display at the front of the church (in the form of a rainbow, or just round the edge of the display area so you can put the purple ones in the middle, or round the pillars, or whatever works in your building).

For each colour, talk about some of the characters and what they did to share the love of God. For the blue ones you may have things like ‘mum’ or ‘grandad’ or ‘godparents’ or ‘teacher’ or you could leave those blank and ask for suggestions, writing them on at the time.

When it gets to the purple ones, get the children to give them out to everyone so that they can write their own names on, and then bring them forward to be added to the display. You might like to put the purple ones all together in the middle, with the ‘saints’ around them (like the great cloud of witnesses).

You can also have an extra set of people (also blank – maybe pink or brown or grey) that are ‘those who are get to come’ – the next generation, people who don’t know God yet, people we might invite to church. These people are to be taken home by the congregation (they don’t need to have names on them) to remind them to share the love of God with everyone they meet, because that’s what saints do.