Ship of Fools: Children's Liturgy for Good Friday

Thread: Children's Liturgy for Good Friday Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Cryptic (# 16917) on :

A bit behind here, posting about a Good Friday, but I've had a had a difficult few weeks, nonetheless I wanted to post about the GF liturgy that we had for our Sunday School children.

It has always niggled me that Easter for our Sunday School has largely missed Holy Week. We tend to go from the celebratory nature of Palm Sunday to the joyful celebration of Easter and miss everything in between. Asking around, it seems that our parish has never had any specific program for children on GF, I think that many parishes would be the same.

This year I wanted to try something different, with the emphasis being taken away from just celebrating Easter, but rather to see Palm Sunday being the start of a journey through Holy Week to Easter Day. On Palm Sunday, we had the usual procession of palms where the children join in with the rest of the parish. Our lesson material that day talked about palm Sunday, but also the events of Holy Week. As a craft activity, the children made a Holy Week calendar to take home as reminder of the time between the two Sundays.

Our parish has a 9.00am service of Stations of the Cross on GF, this is our normal time for Sunday School so it made sense to do our own version at that time. We cut down the "full" version used in the church to a bible reading and prayers at each station, the readings were left as-is, the prayers were re-written in more child-friendly language (but not dumbed-down in any way).

Before GF, I emailed some information about the service to our families, emphasising that this was a quiet service of reflection unlike our usual (at times rowdy) Sunday school, and that some of the younger children would likely find the liturgy to be challenging. On the day, I was delighted to have 12 children between the ages of 4 and 16 attend, as well as 4 parents. We set up the pictures around our crypt so that we could walk the journey, finishing before the altar in our children's chapel. Our rector took the opening and closing prayers, I led the prayers at each station, and children and parents were asked to do the reading at each station. The whole thing took about 35 minutes, and the children realised the solemnity of the occasion and behaved accordingly. At the end of the liturgy we left in silence.

Afterwards, I emailed those present to ask for feedback. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive and that we should continue with this liturgy every year.

Some improvements for next time:
- Some tidying up of language in the prayers
- Some pictures that are a bit more child-friendly
- Copies of the service booklets for the young children that have the pictures only
- Our rector suggested that a quiet morning tea of hot cross buns afterwards to allow a little more time for reflection and fellowship. I was reluctant to do this as i didn't want the solemnity of the service to turn into our usual Sunday carry-on, but seeing how the children behaved, I now have no worries about this (first rule of children's ministry - don't underestimate the children!).

Thanks shipmates for letting me post an after-the-event summary, but for those working in children's ministry, I hope that this experience is useful. If anybody would like a copy of the liturgy that we used, please PM me - happy to pass it on.

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