church in England

Dear five-year-old,

Several weeks ago you asked your parent to ask me, "What is church in England like?" I have been thinking a lot about your question. I go to two churches here. My supervisor (for me to learn about being a priest) is the priest of both of them.

The first thing to say is that The Holy Eucharist is the same in England and Finland. We start with the Liturgy of the Word - there are hymns, prayers, readings from the Bible, and a sermon - and then we have the Liturgy of the Sacrament - the priest tells us the story of Jesus' supper with his friends and his words, "This is my body" and "This is my blood". Your parent would know many of our hymns; some you might even recognize from our church.

Something different is they only have that communion service every other week; in between they have Morning Prayer. That's kind of like the Evensong services we used to have in the big church, or kind of like the Liturgy of the Word but without any communion afterwards. I don't mind not having communion every week, but I really miss The Peace, which isn't part of Morning Prayer.

One of my churches here has a pretty small building, which is sort of modern and boring. There are not a lot of people - usually around twenty I guess, if you count the priest and organist and people like that. Most of them are old. They almost all have grey or white hair. One lady is 100 years old! All of them except me are English. They would like to have younger people come to church and I think if they did come they might stay because these people are so friendly and nice.

My other church meets in a big, old building (not as big as the big church). You can tell it used to be beautiful but now it looks kind of worn out and it's really cold inside. They are worried about how much money it takes to keep it safe (like to fix the roof), let alone for new paint or better heaters. Right next door there is a big house (which is also really cold) and that is where the priest lives. This congregation is bigger than the other one but because the building is so big, it always feels pretty empty.

There are children at this church - one or two babies, several small boys and girls, and three or four teenage girls. At the other church everyone is "white", but at this church there are white people and black people. There's even a young family from Korea. It's hard to get to know the people who aren't white because they never stay to church coffee. I tried to invite one woman one time but she said she has to go to work after church.

They have Junior Church (but not Godly Play). I stay in grownup church and sometimes I help lead it, or even preach. At the end of church the children tell us what they learned about, and one reads a prayer they wrote. The priest always wants the grownups to tell them something about our service, but most of the grownups are too embarrassed. Last week I did it!

GP materials from St. Michael's Workshop

I like church here, but I miss Godly Play and I really miss you and your family!

love, Storyteller

p.s. I should have said that there ARE churches in England who use Godly Play! In fact, I learned how to do Godly Play here in England. But the churches I go to don't happen to use it.

children and chat

Today was a tough day at Junior Church in many ways. I'm always hoping for this kind of atmosphere (which, as this photo shows, we do occasionally have):

photo by stf, faces obscured in accordance with parents' wishes

But today the children's desire seemed to be for something like this:

photo by Eden Keller from Mechanicsburg (used by permission)

Because I'm in ministry training now, I've had to ask other adults week by week to take turns leading. We have agreed to try to keep the rough format the same and to set up the focal shelf each week, but that the lessons in their weeks would be told or read from Bible storybooks (we use the Me Too! Bible stories and the Jesus Storybook Bible (which I learned about from Sheila at Explore and Express)). That (and the fact that we don't use the door person system - again due to lack of training and needing to keep the threshold very low for volunteers) has made it harder for our new children to learn what *I* expect of them, particularly during the lessons.  

I had decided to do the Circle of the Holy Eucharist lesson with them this week, despite not feeling that they were really ready for it yet, because next week we will all be in the big church for Father R's last service with us. It was a mistake. The lesson (or my telling of my version of it) was too long, not engaging enough, too factual, not numinous enough. By the time I was ready to come home I really felt like a failure. 

But on the other hand, as I sat at supper and talked through with Vandriver some of what had gone on today, I realized that the children raised a lot of interesting points and topics today. And thinking over some of my experiences with them over the past several months, it occurs to me that the time we spend chatting is clearly very important to (at least most of) them. 

We always chat for a bit at the beginning of Junior Church, especially if we're waiting for others to arrive. Today we didn't have to wait for anyone, but it felt as though they'd have liked just to carry on talking forever. My trainers told us, Sometimes all you do for the whole session is form the circle. Perhaps I should not have been so fixated on my plan to do the Eucharist lesson. Perhaps what they needed was just to chat!

Afterwards, during the feast, the children's talk included:

• God writes people's names either in The Book of Life or The Book of Death.
• One time on The Simpsons Homer had a dream about God.
• Can we please start eating now? 
• (We always wait to begin eating until everyone is ready. But today the talk ran away before we'd even had time to thank God for our food!)
• Why don't we have Junior Church every day?



image by Stannered

• Another time on The Simpsons God's hand came down right next to Homer!
• No, that was Ned Flanders.
• We have to have adults here because children can't be left on their own.
• My mother says I can travel by airplane all by myself when I'm eight.
• Why aren't you (Storyteller) here every Sunday anymore?
• You're going to Priest-Classes? We should go with you. 
• Fr. R is moving house!
• (a lot of guesses as to where Fr R might be moving to - Borgå, Sweden, Japan, Africa...)
• + a couple of answers to my leading question of why it is that we [supposedly?] talk more quietly than usual in Junior Church. 

Maybe one conclusion from today's session is that I need to be more clear and firm about the behavior I want to see in Junior Church. But maybe another is that I should bear in mind the Montessori principle of following the child, and carve out more space for chatting? Maybe we need a children's fellowship group! Certainly I can be thankful for that the children find Junior Church a safe environment in which to talk about things religious, and that they appreciate the attention I pay to them. 

guest post: One miracle at a time

Written by Finnglish Mum on 6 August

A few weeks ago I decided to take my 5 year old “Monkey” to our regular Sunday Service. She used to come along with me but since the creation of a regular Junior Church she has only rarely joined me at a “grown-up” service. With Junior Church taking a break over the summer months, this was an ideal opportunity to celebrate our faith together. After the service, I wrote the following as a comment for Storyteller on her blog entry about creating the Circle of the Holy Eucharist cards in June.

I just used these cards with "Monkey" for the first time at today’s service. THANK YOU!

I think this is the first time she has sat through a whole "grown-up" service without insisting on drawing or running around and without getting bored! She sat on my lap for the sermon and listened quietly to that and everything else!

We followed the cards together - sometimes peeping ahead and sometimes waiting for a "surprise". She grinned with glee when she recognised someone in a picture, especially Mummy!

It also helped that she knew both the readers and the interceder so I think paid them more attention than otherwise and, of course, the last time she came to a "grown up" service was before the new format Junior Church... She has obviously learned SO much from regular attendance at a Junior Service (not just an escape from the main service!).

She was the only child there and so was not distracted by anyone else, this probably helped, too ;D

Since writing this, we have been together to two more Sunday Services, both with Grandma, visiting from London. Grandma was reading on one occasion, so Monkey watched out for when Grandma should go up to  the front.

She was completely unfazed by Grandma’s involvement in the service; it seemed to her to be completely  natural to see a family member standing up to speak.

So, a huge THANK YOU to Storyteller, Vandriver & stf for teaching my Monkey how to behave at church!

drawing by Sannaksenaho Architects,
made available for media use by the art chapel

I wish this newly found responsible behaviour translated to other churches... we visited the Faith, Hope & Love exhibition at St Henry’s Art Chapel last week and I was so upset and embarrassed that Monkey & her little brother, Mouse, ran around the whole time screaming. The chapel should be so serene and beautiful and we were unable to really enjoy that beauty on this occasion. I even tried invoking the influence of Junior Church – “would you behave like this for Storyteller & stf? You know you should walk slowly and quietly in Junior Church and in the Cathedral, so why are you running and shouting in this church?” Unfortunately it had little effect!

Oh well, I can’t really expect miracles.

Finnglish Mum

Circle of the Holy Eucharist - part three

As I've said already, I presented this lesson on the fly. The downside to this was leaving out some of Berryman's poetry, which I hope to include next time: [Holy Communion] helps us go where words and thinking alone cannot take us. ... This is a time to lift up our hearts, to give thanks and praise. What is beginning to happen is a great mystery. We remember the Last Supper of Jesus and the Twelve and then gradually we are there and it is here. ... Jesus is with us in the bread and wine and we are all together, all over the world, and with all who have lived and died in this huge family of families called the Church.

But the upside was that it was a very personal lesson, about our congregation.

At the end, I wondered which part was their favorite. The child who answered first was not the one who usually answers first. And she pointed to one of the photographs of her mother. 

I still have to work on letting their answers stand for themselves, and not suggesting interpretations, or rephrasing things for them, but I was glad to add or reply this time that one of the nice things about going to adult church would be worshiping together with their families. 

I didn't ask any other wondering questions. As I've said elsewhere, we did look briefly at the liturgical colors in the photos, but really, the children's attention had been exhausted. They were somewhat silly in the response time, and I think it was partly the need to relax after such a long and focussed lesson. It's probably a very good thing that our 3-year-old was absent that day! 

It's a long lesson, and there are no figures to move around, no sand to smooth out (I didn't even have the recommended green underlay). I really pushed my children to the limits of their attention span. But just as they'd begin to flag, there'd be another photograph featuring one of their parents or something else that would catch their attention again (or I'd sing another one of the responses, for example). Almost as soon as I'd finished, one child had a question. I don't think that's happened before in our classroom.

Before collecting the material, I had held up the table, the wine and the bread from the World Communion lesson to introduce the topic. And then, although I left out a lot of Berryman's phrasings, I did keep his idea of setting the scene with two episodes (much abridged) from the life of Christ - the beginning and end of his ministry: his reading Isaiah's prophecy in the synagogue of his hometown and his Last Supper with his friends. The first illustrates the first half of our service, the Liturgy of the Word, and the second illustrates the Liturgy of the Sacrament. On those cards, I used illustrations I had found on-line. This is what one artist thinks that might have looked like. Our children had not heard the first story before, but had heard the second, and I think enjoyed that feeling of "Oh, yes. I remember this!".

All throughout this lesson I felt that we saw connections and moved back and forth between the unfamiliar and the familiar. The Old Testament reading might be one of our Sacred Stories, like the story of the Ark and the Great Flood, or it might be the words of a prophet. Our choir usually sings the Psalm - look who's singing here in this picture. --It's Pappa! 

These were children aged four and five, who don't read yet, and they followed this Enrichment Lesson all the way through. They took it in, asked intelligent questions at the end, and seemed to enjoy it. I was so proud of them, and pleased for our congregation as a whole.

Circle of the Holy Eucharist - part two

This post follows on from yesterday's.

My desire was to create cards which would serve the dual purpose of presenting the Circle of the Holy Eucharist lesson in our classroom and be available for use by our children during adult services when necessary. I loved the idea of featuring photos of our priests and congregation (as done by Christ the King: see yesterday's post). So for over a month now, Vandriver has been snapping photos during our services for me.

Of course, when it came time to make the cards, I discovered that Vandriver had taken many beautiful shots of communion, but only two photos of the congregation singing a hymn, neither of which was ideal. What I needed, though, was only one card for communion, and four or five for hymns! But with some judicious cropping, sorting through photos taken at previous events, even hunting through the Chaplaincy's photographs on Facebook, plus a few "cheats" (such as using the face of someone reading a lesson to illustrate singing instead), I was able to come up with a complete "deck" of cards.

photo by seethroughfaith

At the time I made the cards, I had a vague recollection that Berryman's cards had been orange (all I can think is that that was the color of card that he happened to have on hand that day, and now it has become normative), but it was only upon re-reading the lesson on Monday that I understood that it was to help distinguish the two parts of the service - cards for events during the Liturgy of the Word are orange, cards for the Liturgy of the Sacrament are golden. So I have since gone back and added an orange or yellow stripe to each card. (Although Vandriver points out that these two colors are close enough that some color-blind folk may find them hard to distinguish. It might have been better had Berryman chosen two colors more distinct from each other.)

I used Powerpoint for the cards. For Sunday I just printed Powerpoint "handouts" on good-quality paper. I was in such a rush that they weren't even trimmed symmetrically. Today I'm going to drop off the revised file at the church printing office, and I hope they'll make us nice large (A5?) prints to be laminated for use in church, and slightly smaller ones for use in the classroom. Apart from the size, the cards will be identical.

All cards feature photographs of members of our congregation and/or the priests who serve us. Almost all were taken in the chapel where our adult services are held. A few have smaller photographs of Godly Play materials to emphasize connections - above you see the material for the Trinity on the Creed card, and stones in the desert (a prayer technique we have used) on the Prayers card. The New Testament card shows the German Godly Play picture of Paul writing an epistle (although my children have not had that lesson yet).

Some cards include some of the words that the congregation speaks together: Thanks be to God or Hear our prayer. Some include a question that parents might ask their children, such as What does the priest do while we sing? on the Offertory Hymn card. A very few cards include more text, such as the words we use to close the intercessions on the Prayers card. And a very few include a suggestion, such as You might like to make the sign of the cross, or hold out your hands to "receive" the blessing on the Blessing and Dismissal card.

Within the deck there is at least one photograph of vestments in each liturgical color, which is one of the things we looked at once I had finished presenting. This fit in perfectly for us with the reminder that this week is the last in Eastertide and that we would have a new color next week. I'll tell you a little more about our lesson in my next post.

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.]