Circle of the Holy Eucharist - part one

Next Sunday (Pentecost) will be my last Junior Church session until the autumn. It was looking like we wouldn't have any Junior Church at all across the summer (although now Finnglish Mum is trying to organize something), and I was a little worried about our young children moving suddenly from a situation in which they have their own church for an hour and a half each Sunday... to being in grown-up church for the whole time. So I wanted to present them with the Enrichment Lesson called The Circle of the Holy Eucharist.

I've never seen anyone else's cards for this lesson, apart from having once come across a webpage for Christ the King Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas, who have cards "based on the Godly Play lesson ... for young children to follow the sequence of liturgical actions," which I thought was a lovely idea!

(source - scroll down to find this)

Of course, it took me FAR longer than I had anticipated to create the materials for the lesson. (In fact I've continued to work on them since Sunday and they now look rather different than they did then.) I was right down to the wire having even that earlier version of them ready for Sunday, so I had no time to review Berryman's script for the lesson, let alone rehearse. 

But in some ways, that worked well. I presented the lesson much as I imagine Jerome Berryman did when he first created the lesson. I just gently talked through how our services go. I pointed out the things that occurred to me as I went along - such as that Father R usually uses a red Gospel book, but that all Gospels are also found in every Bible, and Lay Reader G reads out of a regular Bible. I sang a few of the key pieces of service music (or at least the opening phrases), to the tunes that we use in our church: Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy; Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia (before the Gospel reading); Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of power and might; Jesus Lamb of God, have mercy on us. It was gentle and personal, and still now I have a great feeling about it. 

In the next post I want to tell you more about my materials, but for now I'll point you to a photo by seethroughfaith. [I've also written a third post, with more about how the young children coped with the lesson.]