I was preaching at our home church this Sunday morning. Unfortunately there was nobody to do Sunday School in my “absence” – so I ended up doing both! Split the sermon into two parts, each with a reading as intro, with suitable activity for the children as part of that and then Bob took them over to one side of the church and made their own version of what we’d been using. Not clear! Example: Jesus and disciples crossing the lake to find a quiet place; crowd see this happening and get there first. Two paper plates, joined with a split pin; smaller top one painted blue, larger back one with finger painted people on one side… while tell story move a paper boat across the blue plate lake and spin larger plate round so that people are there when boat arrives. Clear as mud!
It went okay, I think, and a couple of people spoke to me afterwards about how they think this must be the way forward for the church (or at least for our church) as we don’t have enough helpers to sustain Sunday School, if we want children to come we need to make them feel welcome, modern attention span seems to be getting shorter and shorter so split sermon is easier for most people to concentrate…
I did feel as though I was juggling and coming very close to dropping all my hoops at times though 😆
Not going to get into philosophical debate about the future of the church right now, but it’s something I think we really need to reflect on 😕
That sounds great Katy. Our church is very child and family oriented and does similar things. Once a month there is what’s called ‘family communion’ where the children can sit at tables at one front corner and do colouring sheets etc, rather than go out to the church hall for Sunday school, and there are points in the service to involve them eg taking the bread and wine up to the altar at that point in the liturgy. And last Sunday we had a variety of activities to move around and do during the service.