In this new book of faith practices for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, parents, grandparents, Sunday school teachers, pastors, and anyone who cares about kids will find easy, fun, and meaningful ideas for bringing the sacred back into the season. The book includes prayers, practices, and stories, grouped by different themes of the Advent and Christmas season, from Decorating, to Family Time, to Giving, to Telling the Story, and more. Practices include: Making an Advent Wreath, Christmas Card prayers, Hot Chocolate Gratitude Party, Year Round Christmas Gift, Silent Night Star Walk, Birthday Party for Jesus, Leaving Hay for Camels, Memory Box for the Year to Come, and many, many more!
Intergenerational
Growing in God’s Love: A Story Bible Curriculum
This relationally focused curriculum dives into the 148 stories from the story Bible. Each session also includes suggestions for intergenerational church and home activities around worship, education, connections, and service. Ideal for any size church to use with multi-age children’s groups.
In this curriculum, children will:
- enter into sacred space together
- read and hear a story of God’s people from Growing in God’s Love: A Story Bible
- pause to let God’s word enter into their hearts and minds
- engage their curiosity and imagination with God’s story
- wrestle with their place in God’s story
- bless one another with God’s grace
Faith Practices Toolkit from the Office of Christian Formation
The Office of Christian Formation of the PCUSA has created toolkit resources based on 5 Christian Spiritual practices. These practices are Hospitality, Prayer, Service, Storytelling, and Retreat Each toolkit explores one of these Sabbath practices and includes “age and stage” guides to help you dig deeper into the practical application for your specific ministry context. We like to think of them as Sabbath practices because each one taps into the essential nature of what it means to celebrate Sabbath communally. Not surprisingly, it’s through our communal participation that we connect with God and one another in a qualitatively different kind of way.
A Sanctified Art
A Sanctified Art makes art & creative resources for church leaders and spiritual seekers.
This team of artists creates multimedia resources for worshiping communities of all shapes and sizes. They work collaboratively to bring scripture and theological themes to life through film, visual art, curriculum, coloring pages, liturgy, graphic designs, and more. Churches can make use of a wide variety of practical resources to get creative beyond the barriers of limited funds, expertise, and time.
All God’s Children: The Church Family Gathers for Lent Collection
GenOn Ministries’ intergenerational resources are designed to intentionally bring generations together to learn and grow spiritually and relationally mid-week, Friday night, Saturday afternoon, or Sunday afternoon/evening. These resources provide ideas and structure that allow a broad span of ages to eat together, play together, study God’s word together, pray together and worship together.
Each session for this 5-session series is meant to be a gathering of about 2 hours at the church or a home. The resource includes Eating Together (with menu, table decorations and prayer), Playing Together (with choices of crafts, games, and other fun activities), Studying God’s Word Together (with Bible study, message to share together and questions for conversation) and Praying Together (with litany, music, sharing what has been experienced, and a closing prayer). Scriptures used in this 5-session unit on Lent are Matthew 4:1–11, John 3:1–17, John 4:5–42, John 9:1–41, John 11:1–45 and carry the theme “From Bulb to Blossom.” This curriculum is downloadable, and samples are available.
Praying in the Messiness of Life
Linda Douty has written a spiritual book that helps us incorporate prayer practices into our daily lives. “God is more interested in our growth than our guilt” reminds readers we are to pray as we can, not as we can’t. Linda offers creative and meaningful ways to connect with God in the midst of daily life, gathered into 7 clusters: Praying with the Body * Praying with Breath * Praying with the Mind * Praying with the Senses * Praying with the Silence * Praying with the Surroundings * Praying with the Circumstances. Great for devotions, retreats, and personal prayer practices.
Vibrant Faith
Vibrant Faith is a group that believes that we need a transformation in the way we envision and design faith formation for all ages and generations in the twenty-first century. Vibrant Faith says “We need families to be communities of faith practice. We need churches that are vital faith forming communities. We need all ages to be engaged in faith forming experiences for a lifetime. We need to engage those who no longer experience belonging and meaning in Christian faith.” Vibrant Faith recognizes that the church–and all of us–are in an era of change, a significant time in the life of the Christian church. They offer new ways to think about how to be the church in the current time.
Areas of support offered include leadership development and coaching (comprehensive and varied), digital strategies and tools (like the Visual Faith Project), and specific projects for faith formation in adult and youth ministry. Several projects are fee for service or subscription based. Vibrant Faith offers frequent webinars, and one to two day seminars around the country.
Faith Formation Toolkit
What do people need in order to grow in their faith? How do you know if your church is meeting those needs? That’s where the Building Blocks of Faith come in.
The Building Blocks of Faith is a new way to look at faith formation using language that is easy to understand. Designed for use with people of all ages, the Building Blocks are based on four shared spiritual needs and longings. They are
- I Belong
- I Know and Understand
- I Have Hope
- I Am Called and Equipped
Evaluating to what extent these four statements are true in your context will help you build a stronger faith formation culture in your congregation.
The Work of the People
The Work of the People is an independent ecumenical platform that produces and publishes multimedia to stir imagination, spark discussion and move people toward discovery and transformation.
Seeing and living in God’s alternative narrative of abundance and freedom often requires a holy disruption that gets us to an altered perspective. The Work Of The People strives to be a holy disruption and prophetic witness that creates multimedia as a daring proclamation and moves people toward growth and divine vocation.
By gathering the wisdom and insight of an unparalleled collection of theologians and practitioners, The Work Of The People have become trusted creators of content that doesn’t decorate, but declares; and curators of a unique cloud of witnesses who challenge and invite us to live upside down and abundant lives.
Illustrated Children’s Ministry
After working in youth ministry for over fifteen years, pastor and artist Adam Walker Cleaveland launched Illustrated Children’s Ministry in September 2015, and it has been growing ever since.
- As the mailing list quickly grew and people kept showing interest in and buying the products we were releasing, it became clear that this was a much-needed resource not only in the area of children’s ministry, but also in finding creative ways to approach faith at home.
- It also became clear that this was much more than a one-person business, and Adam began bringing in others to form the Illustrated Children’s Ministry team.