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Churches challenged to create carnival spirit this Easter

12 March 2007

 

The Church of England should cast off its “characteristic reticence” and look to great Christian festivals in other parts of the world as a of way taking the Christian message into the heart of the community, according to a resource published this week by Church House Publishing.

Writing in the introduction to Together for a Season: All-age seasonal resources for Lent, Holy Week and Easter, the Rt Revd Stephen Platten, Bishop of Wakefield and chair of the Church’s Liturgical Commission, believes the book’s ideas could help inject some carnival spirit into the way the Church marks these major events in the story of Jesus’ life and death: “The Church of England, showing a characteristic reticence, once treated its ‘red letter days’ and great seasonal feasts with much modesty… These volumes offer an opportunity to make connections between worship and living the gospel within every aspect of our lives. This will not displace the quiet celebration of our great feasts; it will complement that. It may, however, allow our own communities to echo some of the carnival already celebrated in other parts of the world.”

Aimed at those planning and leading worship, the book offers ideas and inspiration for inclusive services that reach out to all the senses by using movement, sound, space and light to provide an enriching experience for the whole church as it marks these seasons, the most compelling and powerful of the Christian year.

Written by leading figures from among the Church of England’s worship and children’s advisers, the resource is the second in a three-volume series created as companions to Common Worship: Times and Seasons. It includes fully worked-out services for all the key dates - including Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Ascension and Pentecost – and a CD-ROM, which provides illustrations and templates, the texts of services for easy reproduction, and full-colour photographs to inspire worship.

The book suggests three different ‘pathways’ to help churches to offer an integrated approach to the liturgy marking the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus:

  • The Lenten tree mirrors the use of the Jesse tree, with the gradual addition of symbols to hang from the three as the season progresses;
  • Head, hands and heart focuses on the suffering of Christ and aims to bring what is said in church services into harmony with Christian beliefs and a concern for expressing God’s love in the world through action;
  • The Stations of the Cross are a familiar practice for many Christians and this resource offers a set drawn solely from biblical texts, supplemented by extra stations through Lent and a series of Stations of the Resurrection.

The book also includes a section that explores the relationship between liturgy and drama, and introductions to each of the three seasons covered by the resource.

Tim Lomax, a member of the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission, says: “This book goes much further than a ‘how-to’ guide. By providing a liturgical theology for all-age worship, it does the whole Church a great and much-needed service. Churches and worship planners up and down the land, when inspired by the informed creativity of this resource, will be better equipped to construct multi-dimensional, meaningful and engaging times of all-age worship”.

Together for a Season – All-age seasonal resources for Lent, Holy Week and Easter is published by Church House Publishing, priced £24.50, and is available from Christian bookshops including Church House Bookshop, 31 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BN, tel. 020 7799 4064, email bookshop@chbookshop.co.uk, or on the web (mail order available).