In this book, author Caroline S. Fairless shows how a parish can incorporate its children into full participation with the worshiping community. Tapping their creativity to design a spectacular array of materials for worship -- a storyteller's cloak, prayer cards, confessions stones, rap sermons, sculpture, and painting -- liturgy comes intensely alive for parishioners of all ages. As Fairless demonstrates, the full participation of children in corporate worship, while not a simple matter, is deeply rewarding.
An introduction by Louis Weil, professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, provides the theological rationale for the inclusion of all baptized members in the worship life of the community.
In this book, author Caroline S. Fairless shows how a parish can incorporate its children into full participation with the worshiping community. Tapping their creativity to design a spectacular array of materials for worship -- a storyteller's cloak, prayer cards, confessions stones, rap sermons, sculpture, and painting -- liturgy comes intensely alive for parishioners of all ages. As Fairless demonstrates, the full participation of children in corporate worship, while not a simple matter, is deeply rewarding.
An introduction by Louis Weil, professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, provides the theological rationale for the inclusion of all baptized members in the worship life of the community.
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Overview
In this book, author Caroline S. Fairless shows how a parish can incorporate its children into full participation with the worshiping community. Tapping their creativity to design a spectacular array of materials for worship -- a storyteller's cloak, prayer cards, confessions stones, rap sermons, sculpture, and painting -- liturgy comes intensely alive for parishioners of all ages. As Fairless demonstrates, the full participation of children in corporate worship, while not a simple matter, is deeply rewarding.
An introduction by Louis Weil, professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, provides the theological rationale for the inclusion of all baptized members in the worship life of the community.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780898699104 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Children at Worship
Congregations In Bloom
By Caroline S. Fairless
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2000 Caroline FairlessAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-910-4
CHAPTER 1
Beginnings: The Broad View
If you broaden your understanding of what it means to be the corporate body at worship, broaden it enough to include your community's children at worship with you, you will step onto an exhilarating, unpredictable, sometimes confusing path of a congregation in bloom, whose promise is the approach of the Kingdom of God.
There are those of you in every congregation who are saying, "Something is not quite right about worshiping in ways that segregate." This is your book.
This a book for the whole people of God, lay or ordained, officially titled or not, who are called to a ministry of inclusion.
Children know God. They experience the sacred in all kinds of ways and at a depth that often surprises adults.
In 1992, I was called to Holy Family Church in Half Moon Bay, California, to build a program of Children's Ministries. As you follow the story of our journey, remember that we had no clue as to what that program, faithfully undertaken, might mean for the worshiping community.
In the seven years I served Holy Family Church, the population of our children and youth increased from under ten to about a hundred-twenty.
The program we developed is very simple: it consists of weekly worship whose heart is Holy Communion. Sundays consist of a cracking open of the Word of God in a variety of ways: storytelling, art, drama, and music.
Sundays consist of the kind of education that is born of the experience of God's love made evident in the love of the community. Sundays consist of education and reflection.
Mission Congregation
Holy Family Episcopal Church is a mission congregation in the Diocese of California, and it is blessed with children. Lots of children.
The program we developed is very simple: it consists of weekly worship whose heart is Holy Communion.
Mission churches and children have a lot in common, and it has to do with their capacity to create and re-create and be re-created. Children and missions reflect the same heady excitement of things becoming ... and it's a becoming out of the emptiness.
Holy Family is a mission church, and within that status many things are possible. Mission churches, if they are to stay afloat, have to be clever and bold and daring. Mission churches live at the intersection of invention and pragmatism.
But there's more.
Mission congregations serve the church as the seat of our memory, that moment of creation, in which all things that can be imagined are possible. Mission congregations call us to remember a time when we could build kingdoms with a block of wood and a piece of string and a rubber band.
In that sense, mission congregations can be the church's gift to itself, the standard-bearers of its vision, living and serving, by definition, at the edges.
You have heard it said, "The children are the future." Who is saying that? Not the children. Ask a child if she's the future. If she can even grab hold of the question, which I doubt, she'll tell you that she's the moment. She's the now. Or more to the point, she's hungry.
Their season is Advent, a time of deep scrutiny and the heady excitement of things becoming out of the emptiness.
Whatever we talk about, in terms of program for change—whether it's adult ministries or children's ministries, or jail ministries, or hospital ministries—it has to proceed out of that place. Out of the void, the emptiness.
My purpose here is to reveal our children's program in this light. I want to show you what it is that we've developed, and how we've developed it, beginning at the God-centered place of emptiness—the only place where it makes sense to speak of re-creation and transformation.
You have heard it said, "The children are the future."
Who is saying that? Not the children. Ask a child if she's the future. If she could even grab hold of the question, which I doubt, she'll tell you that she's the moment. She's the now. Or, more to the point, she's hungry. And to appreciate and address her hunger is to turn the church upside down.
Adults are the ones who talk about children as the future. It seems to me that within that statement, far more is said than intended.
Children are our future, so we better make sure they stay in the church. Or at least we better make sure that they come back. Children are our future so we'll develop programs that are child-friendly.
It's very seductive.
Evolution and Renewal
Our churches have done spiritual damage, and continue to do so, not by design, but by inattentiveness, perhaps, or fear, or by our inclination to allow our liturgies to go unexamined. We opt for the familiar, for the convenient.
We often speak to one another about the need for congregational change and revitalization, and we are often correct. But most of us try to apply the solutions before we do the work of spiritual examination. We embark on a "try these shoes" frenzy and as we try and then quickly discard, our discouragement grows.
Although this book is about the practical applications of the work of renewal as it has unfolded in one small congregation, the work is far broader. The people of Holy Family Church discovered that their theology of community, which came to be expressed in liturgy, spilled over into every aspect of their congregational life.
This will be true as well for your congregation. You will begin to function as a community, make decisions as a community, expand your understanding of congregational ministry.
But always remember that what works for one congregation may not work in another. What works for that congregation today will evolve further tomorrow. This book is built around the centrality of change, in our lives and in our liturgies, using one community's children as the centerpiece.
Children at Worship is built upon principles of liturgical evolution. Understood properly, our liturgies are designed to reflect, to respond to and to deepen the spirituality of the worshipping congregations. By definition, then, liturgies must evolve. Can we not learn to embrace the principles of evolution as necessary and highly desirable?
The difficulty in the writing of this book lies in its fundamental premise: the liturgies of a community of faith are designed both to express and to deepen the spiritual work of the congregation. In order to do that, liturgies must evolve even as the spirit deepens, or they become a tight skeleton around the body, like the exoskeleton of a lobster.
Evolving liturgies, by definition, are difficult to delineate within the bounds of a book.
Consider the process of this manuscript over a six-month period. A draft was sent out to selected readers, whose task it was to comment on the content.
Readers' critiques came in over the summer, and by early fall, I had arranged six weeks of sabbatical time to revise, format, and submit the manuscript for publication.
Two weeks prior to my departure, however, I began to hear rumblings. Nothing major. Just those clues that it's time to take another step. Just as I believed that this manuscript was ready to go, I began to hear the still-inarticulate voices of people expressing a hunger to go deeper.
It is important to say this, because the liturgical work of a congregation is never finished. We speak of the forms of worship as though they were gods. Our liturgical churches are masters at this.
Yet, even as I offer this book as the best of our efforts to date, we are constantly called ever deeper into the corporate expression of praise and adoration that belongs only to God. The forms and decisions offered here were already changing as I wrote this book and continue to change as you read it.
Children at Worship: Congregations in Bloom
Realizing the fluid nature of this process, the question quickly became, "How do we continue and foster this conversation after the book is published? With that question, an idea was formed, and with the idea, an organization.
Children at Worship: Congregations in Bloom is a non-profit, tax-exempt, grassroots association of lay and ordained ministers of churches and other organizations who are committed to the fundamental questions of community.
We are teachers of a radical sort, and we teach congregations and clusters of congregations the precepts and strategies of full inclusion in our worship communities. We are priests, musicians, artists, preachers, laborers, architects, administrators, and dreamers.
We believe we pay a grievous price for a single voice lost. We know the value of the voices and perspectives of our children and youth. Our hearts beat with the urgent need to transform our traditional and often exclusive forms of worship into structures which engage whole communities. We are committed to the enfranchisement, empowerment, and full participation of everyone, particularly children, and all those who have remained at the edges of our churches.
Consider us as your resource center for inclusive and engaging worship. Make use of our interactive website:
www.childrenatworship.org Children at Worship: Congregations in Bloom info@childrenatworship.org (e-mail)
Use This Book
This is a book of many voices: voices of children; voices of their parents; voices of lay and ordained educators; voices that cross denominations and speak from outside the Christian faith. This book carries the voices of tradition; the voices of the prophets and theologians; the voices of the artists. Mostly this is the collective voice of the child in all of us.
If you don't yet recognize your own voice in these chapters, then add it; speak it. There is a dream at work here, and it is the dream of conversion. There are congregations, educators, and people of faith in every pocket of the world who understand and commit to the renewal of our faith. These are the voices that belong in this book and those to follow.
While I use many words and pictures from the children of Holy Family, the names are fictitious unless attached to specific poetry or art.
This Book is a Teaching Text
People in congregations often speak to me of their isolation, their lack of support. Fear drives this sense of aloneness, I think. God hasn't given us the gifts of prophecy and discernment and vision only to allow them to shrivel. There are fellow pilgrims in your communities. Your task is to identify them.
Use this book to teach one another. Use it to convert one another. Use it to build a congregational core grounded in the principles contained here: principles of full inclusion; of the priesthood of all believers; mutual ministry; principles of discernment. Make sure that these principles form the basis of the work of discernment and vision. Use this book to challenge your clergy. Use it to paint a new dream. Use it as a tool for the revitalization of your faith community. Use it to carry this conversation outside the borders of your own denominations.
I have written this book from three perspectives; each is woven into each chapter.
First, I write as a leader and designer of worship. For those of you who do what I do, lay or ordained, my hope is to touch on the joys and difficulties, the hopes and promises of the kind of work that we do, weekly, seasonally, year in, year out.
Second, I write from the experience and the stories of Holy Family Church. And here is my hope—as more and more of us are drawn into the conversation, the "we" will expand to include the experiences, stories and struggles from congregations across denominations and across the borders of faiths. The voice of "we the people of God" cannot help but grow if we use this book as the beginning of our discussions.
Third, my hope is to carry a theological thread throughout each chapter. It not only matters what we do and how we do it, but why.
In the sidebars of each chapter, you will find questions for reflection. As you use these and others you might develop, remember that these conversations need to happen congregation-wide. Choose participants for the breadth of their opinions. Let the conversations be difficult.
Most of us in faith families are hungry. Most of us want the same food. We let ourselves be deterred by fear, anxiety, tradition, and our own early church experiences.
Design conversations in an informal setting, perhaps around a meal. Include children and youth. This is critical. Get in the habit of saying to yourselves, "Never again may we have a conversation about our congregational vision that does not include our young people."
The Children's Charter
At its convention in 1997, the Episcopal Church adopted the Children's Charter for the Church. This document calls the people of God in three ways: to the nurture of children; to minister to children; and to discern and raise up the ministries of children.
The principles, applications, suggestions, anecdotes and resources contained in this book derive from the goals and purposes set forth in the Children's Charter.
In particular, this book is concerned with the ministries of children. How does a faith community live into its vocation of the ministry of all the baptized?
The Children's Charter reads, in part, "The Church is called: to receive children's special gifts as signs of the Reign of God; to foster community beyond family, in which children, youth and adults know each other by name, minister to each other, and are partners together in serving Christ in the world; to take their place in the life, worship and governance of the church."
Children belong in church. They belong in the regular worship life of their faith community. And they need to be honored and recognized as fully participatory partners in the decision making of the body.
The Children's Charter is reprinted in Appendix A.
Children Belong in Church
By virtue of the covenant we make or the covenant that is made on our behalf at our Baptism, children belong in church. Our Baptism compels us to understand even the "least of these" as fully participating members of the eucharistic community. What that means is that they are integral to the regular worship of the congregation.
But to understand the theology of inclusion is only one step in the process of discovery. For it is not until communities have reconfigured their regular worship in such a way as to allow for the participation and engagement of their children, that they will even begin to understand the transformative power of this decision. Children belong in church, and every time a community opts for the inclusion of its children, that conviction will sink ever deeper
In Closing
As the fruits of our work come to you in the form of this book, an adaptation of a Benedictine prayer floats through my mind:
I ask you to pray for my conversion, as I continue to pray for yours.
Shalom.
CHAPTER 2
Harriet and I
Though neither of us knew it at the time, my childhood friend Harriet taught me a lesson I will never forget.
She used to take me into the woods in the early spring. We'd go belly down into the snow-soaked leaves of maple and oak, and we'd wait.
Harriet was better at it than I.
"What are we waiting for this time?" I'd ask her.
"Sh-h-h. I don't know yet."
And with that admission my spirits would sink. It was likely we'd be there a long time.
"Are you sure you don't know?"
Stories
• Never underestimate the power of personal stories.
• Personal stories draw children into any discussion about God.
• Personal stories help children expand their understanding of the sacred.
"I won't know until I see it."
"Oh."
And then, there it would be, in front of our eyes. Maybe just sitting there for the longest time before we could see it. Before we could do whatever it was that was required of us—slow ourselves down, be silent, pay attention, wait, trust.
Maybe the young shoot of a Western Pennsylvania narcissus or a daffodil. Maybe a sluggish beetle coming to life on a warm March afternoon. Or a spider crawling up a new blade of grass. A mushroom. A puff ball. Or a robin, bringing a flash of color to the still-drab woods.
"Just wait," Harriet would tell me.
We were never disappointed. Never.
And the subjects of our discovery became our teachers. They instructed us in God. Instructed us in God's world. Our teachers made us laugh. A fuzzy orange caterpillar swimming over pine needles and soggy maple leaves on his way to some clandestine and mysterious ritual, deep into the heart of the forest. Our teachers would have us hold our breaths in the face of their splendor. An eight-point buck rubbing his velvet antlers against an ancient and gnarled apple tree. They'd have us run away. A Pennsylvania black snake, gentle as she was, could do it every time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Children at Worship by Caroline S. Fairless. Copyright © 2000 Caroline Fairless. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword: Children and the Liturgy—A Perspective
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Welcome to Worship
Chapter Two: Let the Children Come to Me
Chapter Three: Share the Good News
Chapter Four: Dear Mr. God
Chapter Five: Give Me a New Heart, O God
Chapter Six: The Community of the Bathtized
Chapter Seven: Come to the Table
Chapter Eight: Paint the Stories
Chapter Nine: A Spillover Church
Appendix A: The Children's Charter
Appendix B: Suggested Readings
Appendix C: Orders of Service
Appendix D: Evolutionary Liturgy