Help for a Holy Lent and Blessed Easter

For those in ministry to children, youth, and adults in the church, offering resources to help make the seasons of Lent and Easter meaningful and spiritual is important. Thankfully, this doesn’t require a lot of work or a big budget. There are some wonderful websites out there which offer creative activities for all ages to help them celebrate a holy Lent and blessed Easter.

Bless Each One
The website Bless Each One: Weaving faith into everyday life has a section on Lent and Easter. There is a free downloadable Lenten devotional based on the Psalms which has an introduction, readings for each day, and weekly discussion questions. There are also suggestions for easier to read versions of the Psalms for children and teens. Holy Week reading bookmarks are available to distribute to church families. One side has a reading for each day of Holy Week while the other side can be used to share the times of your Holy Week services. The bookmarks are available in Microsoft Word format, so you can customize them for your church’s use.

Building Faith
Enter “Lent” in the Building Faith search box and a number of the blog’s posts will come up, including one about creating a prayer loom or a prayer net as a group activity. There’s also a post about Creating a Lenten Prayer Space at Home which can be shared with your congregation by email or as a link on your church’s website.

PRC – Practical Resources for Churches
The Lent and Easter page of PRC’s Links & Online Resources section includes booklets on Celebrating Lent and Easter in Sunday School, Holy Week Activities for Children, and Making Lent More Meaningful to Children. The booklets include clickable links to information and suggested activities. You can also watch free recorded webinars on topics related to Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. In addition, there are lists of websites with Lenten children’s activities.

Rethinking Youth Ministry
You’ll find several blog posts with Ideas for Lent on the Rethinking Youth Ministry website, including directions for putting together Lenten prayer stations based on the Lord’s Prayer. Unfortunately, since most of the posts are several years old, you may encounter a few dead links so you might have to adapt the ideas accordingly.

-Debbie Kolacki

Interactive Prayer Stations for Lent

This is a simple prayer station with ashes. Participants are invited to take a piece of burlap from the basket to remind them that Lent is a season of repentance.

Lent is a contemplative season, a time to turn inward and focus on our spiritual nature and relationship with God. Churches offer special corporate worship services and study opportunities during this solemn time. They also encourage personal spiritual practices such as meditation, fasting, and almsgiving. More and more churches are now offering interactive prayer stations during Lent, allowing participants an opportunity for personal reflection while being physically present with others in the body of Christ.

Prayer stations can be set up in a church sanctuary or other area and may stand alone as a worship experience, be part of a special worship service, or be available for individuals before or after Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, or another Lenten worship service. The space for each prayer station is set up with directions and objects which allow people to participate at their own pace. The purpose is to create a time and space for people to experience God’s presence in their lives. They can be very simple or quite elaborate. There are plenty of ideas for prayer stations using simple materials, so it is something that anyone can put together. However, those with a creative, artistic bent can also offer their talents to create original prayer stations.

When experiencing prayer stations, people are given an opportunity to engage and interact with their faith in tangible, relevant ways using a variety of their senses.  This is meaningful for adults but is also appealing for youth and even families who may wish to experience the stations together.

Lenten prayer stations can be based on the traditional Stations of the Cross, alternate/Protestant Stations of the Cross, or another theme appropriate for the season. The Rethinking Youth Ministry website has suggestions for prayer stations based on phrases in the Lord’s Prayer. A simple set of prayer stations based on the Lenten symbols of ashes, water, clay, and oil can be created if space is limited or if you wish to keep the prayer stations up for several weeks.

Practical Resources for Churches can work with you to create prayer stations for your own church, whether you choose to visit us in person, telephone, or contact us by email. We would love to be a part of bringing this meaningful contemplative activity to your congregation.