Seasonal Resources

• Season of Creation Celebration Guide
  • This resource isn't specific to children, youth, or families, but is jam packed with ideas for how to broadly engage with the Season of Creation as a church community. 
• A Rocha Nature Exploration Program
  • This is a 5 day Vacation Bible School program, but you can easily take pieces of it to incorporate in worship, Sunday School, Messy Church, or any other gathering for chidlren or families. 
• For the Love of Creation
  
  • For the Love of Creation is a national ecumenical initiative that brings together faith bodies and faith-based organizations in Canada under a unified banner to mobilize education, reflection, action and advocacy for climate justice. Utilizing their resources with youth is a great way to take part in the Season of Creation.  

Ordinary time makes up the bulk of our church year. In Godly Play, this time is called "the green, growing Sundays". This is a good time to think about how to strengthen your base for intergenerational worship, supporting families in practicing faith at home, opportunities for your church community to connect meaningfully beyond Sunday morning, and whatever else shapes the lifelong formation of your church community. 

Here are a few suggestions:

• Prayer Stations - These offer a different way to engage in prayer for people of all ages. There are countless ideas for what a prayer station could be, but these examples, along with others you can find with a simple google search could be incorporated into a regular worship service, offered for families to use or try at home, or be used as the foundation for something totally new. 
• Messy Church - For many of you, this won't be a new idea, but it is a Fresh Expression of church that offers an opportunity for folks of all ages to worship together in a new way. There are some Messy Church resource books available from the Youth and Family Ministry Resoure Library.
• Have a monthly meal together - This is a pretty basic idea that can be scaled to just about any size. Fundamentally the idea here is for folks in your church community to gather and share a meal on a regular basis. Maybe it's families going to one another's houses. Maybe it's a potluck for the whole church. Maybe it's small groups. Again - there are so many possibilities for what this could look like, but ultimately is about deepening interpersonal relationships within the church community. 
• Find new ways to freshen up worship - What if instead of a sermon you had a group discussion? Or what if instead of one of the readings someone shared a poem that they wrote about God or a picture that they drew? What if you did the entire service in reverse order? Get creative and have fun!

Coming Soon!

Coming Soon!

Coming Soon!

For Kids

• 49 Brilliant Easter Games, Crafts, and Activities for Sunday School
  • From Ministry Spark. It does feel a little like cheating to include a list on a list of resources, but this one is PACKED with a while range of ideas and possibilities, so you are almost sure to find something that will work for your context here. 
• Free Easter Curriculum for Children's Church or Sunday School Lessons
  • If you are specifically looking for something for your Sunday School, this free Go! Curriculum resource might be just the ticket. 
• A Meaningful Easter Egg Hunt
  • From Episcopal Relief and Development (similar to the Primate's World Relief and Development Fund), this is a set of conversation prompts to tuck inside Easter eggs. 

For Youth

• Youth Led Easter Vigil
  • A brief (well, brief for an Easter vigil!) video from the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego.
• Holding Space for Hard Things in the Midst of Joy
  • There's no link for this, and there's not handy downloadable resource. Just something to think about as you consider exploring Easter with your young people. It should come as no surprise to you that these days many youth are struggling. Mental health comes to mind, but there are lots of hard things going on in the lives of teenagers. Rushing through the grief and loss of Good Friday to the joy and celebration of Easter can sometimes feel like church or youth group isn't a safe space for those hard things. So, try to find ways to hold space for both. There can be joy and fun and hope AND struggle can still be present. 

For Families

• Messy Church Easter Resources
• Easter Family Worship Guide & Art Activity
  • This is a paid resource, but at $5, it's pretty affordable for most congregations. This is from their site:

    The guide provides meaningful engagement with the biblical narrative and the creation of a single piece of artwork that tells the Easter story. Using this guide, families will make space (at least 30 min) on each of the three major Easter days – Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter to pray, read, and create together as a family. It will prompt at-home conversations, equip families to create something meaningful, and help them engage Easter together in a visual, tactile, and refreshing way!

Lenten Letters in a Box - This resource is designed to equip parishes to create boxes with everything that a family needs to engage in Lent in an intentional and creative way through a series of letters and activities. We put this together in 2021, and have updated it a bit for 2022. Even if you used it in your parish last year, it's still a great gift to offer the families in your community. 

• Click here to download a pdf of the instructions for this resource, including all of the links to download the letters and additional resources. 

Pinterest - We've got some creative options pinned to our Lent Pinterest Board.

• Check that out here. 

Lent Madness - This is a lighthearted Lent offering, a showdown of the Saints of sorts. Each day two Saints will "face-off", you can check out the site, learn more about them, and vote for who you think should move on to the next round. 

• Here's where you'll find that Lenten fun. 

Love Builds Up - A 40-Day Family Challenge. Here’s the challenge: For each of the six weeks of Lent, spend some time at the beginning of the week (Sunday night, maybe?) reading that week’s Bible passage together.  Talk as a family about the suggested topic, using the devotional’s optional conversation prompts if you like. Commit to taking on an action or practice for that week - and then just watch as the Realm of God fills, strengthens, and beautifies your house and the world!

• This is a downloadable resource from the Salt Project. You can download it for personal use here, or parish use here or here depending on the size of your parish.

Stations of the Cross for Children  - The Rev'd Patti Brace put this together and has generously allowed us to share it here. It's creative, interactive, and a great way to engage children and families. 

• Download a zip file with everything you need - including some example photos! - here. 

• Church of Ireland Children's Ministry
  • This is a whole collection of ideas for how to share the story of Pentecost with Chidlren in your midst!
• StoryMakers
  • StoryMakers is a really great resource for all kinds of faith formation - this in particular is a reflection and video for Pentecost. The video is aimed at kids, and includes Pentecost fun facts and a craft. 
• Sharing the Pentecost Story with Video & Activities
  • From Building Faith (A Ministry of Virginia Theological Seminary), this page includes ideas for a children's message and an activity. 
• Pentecost at Home
  • Another option from Building Faith, this one is sepecifically meant for families at home. 
• Breathe: A Child's Guide to Ascension, Pentecost, and the Growing Time
  • To be honest, I don't know much about this book, but right now it is on the way as the newest addition to the Youth and Family Ministry Resource Library, so I'll give it a good read through, and then update this! If you'd like to borrow it, let me know at acolp@nspeidiocese.ca
• Pentecost in Coronatide
  • We are still in the midst of a pandemic, and this resource is really intentional about that! Elsa Anders Cook has designed a "Worshipful Moment" called Wind Power, using kites as a tool for gathering and marking this time. Well worth checking out!
• Free Pentecost Colouring Page
  • If you've read through other recommendations from me, you'll likely already know that I'm a huge fan of Illustrated Ministries. They produce artful and creative resources to enhance all sorts of ministries, and this colouring page is no exception. You can print out individual colouring pages, one huge poster for collaboration, or you can print the image as a set of tiles, with each person colouring in one, and then piecing them all together. The possibilities are endless here, and it's something that is great for folks of all ages.