Make Room: A Child’s Guide to Lent and Easter

For parents and Christian educators, explaining to children the meaning of Lent and telling them the stories of Holy Week can be challenging. Christmas emphasizes the birth of a baby surrounded by animals and angels. Before you know it, that baby is a grown man who is arrested, put on trial, and condemned to death. It’s tempting to concentrate on Easter Sunday, but children won’t truly understand what happened that day unless they have some understanding of the events that preceded it.

Make Room: A Child’s Guide to Lent and Easter by Laura Alary with illustrations by Ann Boyajian is a wonderful tool adults can utilize to help children see Lent in a positive light and understand the last days of Jesus’ life and his resurrection. The book reads like a poem; the illustrations are beautiful and simple and suit the words of the book.

Most of Make Room is focused on Lent and how Christians make time to be with God during the season. Children learn about prayer and how we talk with God in different ways – with words, music, and colors — as well as how we make silence, read Bible stories, and pay attention to how we live. While acknowledging that making room for God during Lent can be hard, it is also portrayed as a positive action.

During Lent we make space.
We clean our whole house.
We sort our clothes and toys and books
and give away what we do not use.
It is hard at first.
I like my things and I want to keep all of them.
But someone else might need them more than I do.
Besides, I like having space in my room.
It makes me feel lighter.

There are also stories from the life of Jesus including how Jesus went out to the desert to make time for God. The description of Holy Week is simple yet includes all the essentials. The events and the sadness of Good Friday are acknowledged but quickly followed by the joy of Easter morning.

This book could be used in children’s ministry or a family setting; it could even be given as a gift to adults who would enjoy the simple, contemplative feelings it invokes. It is available from Paraclete Press; the list price is $15.99 but right now it is on sale for $11.19. You can also order it from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Paraclete Press provided me with a review copy of this book.

-Debbie Kolacki

Two new Sunday school curriculums coming Fall 2015

This fall two denominational publishers are introducing new Sunday school curriculum. One comes from Cokesbury, the publisher for the United Methodist Church, and the other comes from PC USA, the publisher of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Cokesbury’s new curriculum is called Deep Blue; the name is based on the Deep Blue Kids Bible. If you’re not familiar with the award winning Bible in the Common English Bible translation you can check out a sample here. Deep Blue replaces Cokesbury’s Grow, Proclaim, Serve curriculum.

The Deep Blue curriculum is comprehensive; besides resources for preschool, early, middle, and older elementary students, there are also resources for Babies & Woddlers, Toddlers & Twos, and a one year Bible survey called Submerge for children preparing to transition to youth group. Other options considered part of the Deep Blue curriculum are the One Room Sunday School for children ages 3 to 12 and a Large Group/Small Group format in two age groups.

According to Cokesbury’s publicity Deep Blue includes “adventure, exciting stories, science experiments, arts and crafts, animated video storytelling for today’s media-savvy kids, and active games—all combined into a living-faith experience that will help children discover what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ today.”

Asia, Edgar, and Kat are the Deep Blue Kids characters and appear in animated stories on DVD. The DVDs also include Bible verse videos, Bible trivia, and music videos. There’s even an app for kids and parents with information, games, and more, and the Deep Blue website offers sample lessons/videos, teacher training videos, lesson summaries, home activities, and more.

The new curriculum from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is called Growing in Grace & Gratitude and includes resources for ages 3-5, 5-7, and 8-10. There is also a multiage option for children ages 5-10. The publicity for the curriculum emphasizes that it is founded in “Presbyterian identity where God’s grace and our gratitude are the heartbeat of our faith, life, and worship.” The curriculum “inspires children to learn and practice hospitality, generosity, and love; and reaches beyond Sunday morning, encouraging children to live their lives as an expression of God’s grace.”

A free sampler with color resources, a story, and a page for families to use at home is available on the PC USA Store website. It includes one session for each age group. There is also a link to a page where downloadable samples of the curriculum are available. There are audio versions of all the Bible stories, an interactive e-book for families to use at home, and a music CD. Sessions are available in English and Spanish.

Messy Church: a new way of doing church for families

The Messy Church movement started in England but is spreading around the world; it’s presently in twelve other countries including the United States. If you’ve never heard of Messy Church, it’s a church program for families and others based around welcome, crafts and art, celebration and eating together. It’s a program which seeks to reach out to people who don’t ordinarily attend church services.

Messy Church gatherings aren’t usually on Sunday mornings. Their time and place is determined by what is best for families. Here at PCR we’re seeing a trend toward churches exploring times other than Sunday morning for their children’s ministry programs.

Hope Lutheran Church located in Selden, New York, offers Messy Church once a month for about two hours. Their website states that “The group includes parents and grandparents, children and teens, who play some games, work on craft activities, join in an upbeat time of celebration about an important story from the Bible, and spend time sharing a family-style meal prepared by loving hands.”

Rev. Dr. Richard Hill, the pastor of Hope Lutheran, spent time in England researching the Messy Church program before starting it in his own church. He will be presenting a webinar on Messy Church for us on May 20, 2014. If you’re not able to attend the live presentation, a recording of the webinar will be available for one year after the broadcast. You can click here to register to attend or view the recording.

You can also visit the Messy Church website for more information. There are books, DVDs, and other resources available on the resources page of the website.

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