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**DIY Paper Nativity by Joel Henriques (http://madebyjoel.com)
http://madebyjoel.com/?p=4362
A new and beautifully simple paper nativity by Joel Henriques, two pdf files makes up the entire kit. While you’re there check out some of his other craft ideas, paper cities and his book (I can highly recommend)
Probably one of the more professional looking DIY printable sets, and one of my favourites. An 8 page printable booklet that you can create into a beautiful paper nativity theatre. A fun project you can print from your home computer and assemble yourself.
**DIY Advent Calendar with Matchbox Nativity Characters (Free to download)A simple and beautiful 24 piece printable Advent Calendar with nativity characters
A simple and beautifully designed paper craft Nativity set by Marloes de Vries. This set comes as a pre-coloured kit and a black and white colour in kit. Includes Wise men, Shepherd, Donkey, Mary, Joseph, Baby, Angel & Cow.
A very simple paper craft nativity set, invite kids or others to colour in the characters and then create the scene by cutting each part out and gluing them together.
A very simple Christmas craft, a nativity christmas tree ornament set, not the best of the collection but simple and easy to create.
Very simple printable colour-in nativity craft, print out, colour in, cut and bob’s you uncle.
A more traditional nativity scene with a stained glass backdrop.
a much more complex project this kit creates a full 3D paper craft nativity with individual characters to cut, fold and assemble. This particular set would probably require adult help, or create as a congregational or family project
Similar to the flatpack kit above this Advent Nativity set by Si Smith is a set of 25 characters that form together to create a nativity that spans from the announcement of the pregnancy of Elizabeth through to the escape to Egypt. I love this particular kit and have created it a number of times over the years.
A great collection of nativity-based ideas including 3 Part Cards, Beginning Sounds, Matching Cards, Read Write the Room, Pocket Cards, Which One Is Different, What Comes Next, Pre Writing Practice, Pattern Cards, 10 Piece Puzzles, 4 Piece Puzzles, Size Sorting, Coloring Pages, Writing Pages, Dot Marker Pages, Picture to help tell the story, Small Book, and more.
A fantastic collection of Nativity themed ideas including patterns, puzzles, story timeline, maze, spelling book and more
a beautiful craft idea for home or sunday school or worship, the project would probably involve some homework as you’d need to pre-cut the silhouette before you kick off.
These Nativity printables will give your preschooler hours of fun and exposure to early learning skills like ABCs, counting, early reading, shapes, colors and more!
Alternative Music Suggestions Pt1
A number of alternative Christmas songs, songs that perhaps might not get regular airplay over Christmas time, especially during worship or around the candles at Carols by Candlelight. Link
Alternative Music Suggestions Pt2
A number of alternative Christmas songs, songs that perhaps might not get regular airplay over Christmas time, especially during worship or around the candles at Carols by Candlelight. Link
Advent & Christmas Carols by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette
Carolyn writes a number of hymns that have been used by many churches around the US and beyond, she also re-writes lyrics to traditional hymns, making old carols new again.
Some of these videos are free to use, while others are available to purchase as a download (eg. Igniter Media Videos)
Holy Moly – Jesus is born by WeAreSparkhouse
The Christmas Story by St Paul’s Art & Media
The Earth Stood Still by Scott Zibell
An Unexpected Christmas by St Paul’s Art & Media
Retooning the Nativity by Igniter Media
Riches to Rags by Woodman Valley Chapel
O Night Divine by Eliot Rausch
Star News Bethlehem by St Paul’s Art & Media
Angels We Have Heard on High by Hilary Grist
A Baby is Coming by Igniter Media
The Christmas Story by Diocesan Junior School, Aukland
The Christmas Chord by 2V Studios
Nativity Story by CCV Media
O Little Town of Bethlehem by St Paul’s Art & Media
A Social Christmas by Igniter Media
766 Christmases by St Paul’s Art & Media
The Nativity Story by Kerith Community Church
World Nativity Project by the WNP
The Paradox of Christmas by Igniter Media
The Gospel According to Hamlet – The Annunciation
Spill The Beans – Advent through to Epiphany with a Scottish flavour
Beautiful collection of liturgical ideas, thematic crafts, games, dramas, readings. a Must have for people curating worship over Advent/Christmas time this year. Link
Truth in Tinsel – An Advent Experience For Little Hands
Spend December impressing God’s Word on your kids’ heart! You’ll get 24 days of Scripture reading, ornament crafts, talking points and extension activities. Plus fun printables and templates. This is the perfect book for kids of any age–from preschool to elementary Link
Mucky Paws – Advent & Christmas Liturgies
Mucky Paws is a collection of liturgies created for use in worship written by Roddy Hamilton. What follows is a beautiful catalogue of liturgy, prayer, art, worship, drama spanning over 7 years worth of creative worship.
A Christmas Story You’ve Never Heard Before by Gordon Atkinson (iTunes)
The Shepherd’s Story by Gordon Atkinson (iTunes)
Two beautiful stories written by Gordon Atkinson (aka Real Live Preacher) that will allow you to experience the Christmas story differently, these are truly original and amazing stories. You can download them from his site and listen to them, but please consider paying for them, on itunes (link)
Experience The Christ Child – Christmas With Children
Written by Meg Everard, BoE, Synod of NSW/ACT. This booklet is designed to assist your congregation, kids club, Sunday School group, to really experience Christmas anew. To listen, to feel and to see the stories that make up this magical story with new eyes. Each of the experiences are linked with a Bible passage and are adaptable as you see fit. Each of the experiences are as powerful for children as they are for adults, so don’t be scared to involve your whole congregation. Many of the experiences will take some setting up, and some organisation before hand – so working on these as a team can be valuable. This booklet is divided into three well known stories that symbolise Christmas for many of us. You are invited to use one, or all depending on your group. (pdf download)
Worship The Christ Child – Christmas With Children
Written by Meg Everard, BoE, Synod of NSW/ACT. This booklet is designed to assist your congregation, kids club, Sunday School group, to lead worship with primary school aged children in the days leading up to Christmas. Please feel free to use part or all of the ideas contained in this booklet. The booklet is divided into four sections:
Worship is central to our practiced faith as Christians, it is a time when we gather to praise, celebrate and share with God. For children is can hold mystery, wonder and sometimes, lets be honest boredom. This booklet looks at new ways to worship and engage children with stories, imaginings and prayer that reflect the reality of Jesus’ birth. Through this resource I hope that children will dive into the story that is Christmas, to see new wonder, experience the story anew and that together you will grow as a community of faith. (pdf download)
DIY Advent Calendars – An Advent Resource
Last year my community started Advent by creating our own Advent Calendars, I put the kits together using Christmas cards, cardboard, reflections from other calendars I’ve received from Alternativity.co.uk and Proost.co.uk and friends like Mark Pierson over the years, I also put some rituals and practices together myself.
It was a great way for us as a community to start to think about how we individually and corporately prepare for Christmas. Link
ALTERnativity – Alternative Resources for Re-thinking & Re-imagining Advent & Christmas
Alternativity is a resource produced in the UK by a group of people who wanted to develop new ways and liturgies for individuals, families and communities to explore, re-tell, play with and enter into the story of Jesus’ birth. The books develloped by the project include liturgies that can be used in worship in a variety of settings, the book “The Alternativity Meal” for example gives a process for families or communities to enter into a meal that re-tells the story of Christ’s birth, much like the passover meal.
I highly recommend these resources to churches, families and communities who want a set of resources that are very different and that will encourage them, their children and their community to explore the stories of our faith in new, thoughtful and exciting ways… Link
Going for Growth – Advent & Christmas Resources
The Church of England has a number of great resources available on their website for worship during Advent & Christmas.
Advent comes from the Latin word Adventus, which means coming, and it’s the time when the Church gets ready for the coming of Jesus, celebrated at Christmas. The readings in the lectionary look forward not only to Christ’s first coming as a babe in Bethlehem, but also to his eventual second coming as judge and ruler of all. The themes are:
In Roman times purple cloth was the most costly, and was associated with kings and rulers. And so the colour for Advent, the getting ready for King Jesus, is purple.
All too often, Advent gets lost in rehearsals for Christmas presentations, and the sense of anticipation and waiting disappears. The ideas in this section offer ways of recapturing Advent as a season in its own right – preparing ourselves to receive the gift of the Christ Child on Christmas morning. (Link)
With Love To the World is a fantastic, up to date, lectionary resource that could help people as they prepare for the coming of Love over the Advent season, or as they prepare their sermons and worship for the Advent & Christmas season.
With Love to the World is a daily Bible reading guide based on the Revised Common Lectionary as adapted for use in the Uniting Church in Australia. There are four issues per year. Link
Nine from Proost.co.uk
There is a traditional Christmas worship service of 9 lessons and carols which follows the Christmas story. Inspired by Grace in London who have created their own contemporary take on this service we invited nine artists or groups of artists to create a piece in response to one of the readings. We hope you like the results! There are 6 movies and 3 tracks.
As ever use with imagination… for personal reflection, to celebrate a family Christmas in the home, or to create a unique worship experience in your faith community/church. Read the reading and then watch or listen and reflect. Link
The Hopeful Imagination blog has been running over Advent for a few years now and has a great collection of reflections, ideas, prayers, poems written by a number of different people. Link
Mustard Seed Associates (Christine Sine)
Advent is almost here. This wonderful season of hope and expectation begins a new liturgical year by drawing us into the excitement of Christ’s birth and the joyful anticipation with which we await it. It is a time to wait, to hope, to rethink our focus, and to imagine new ways to follow and serve Christ into the future. Now is the time to store up the resources we need to stir our imaginations and create new rituals and expressions of faith that guide us through a season in which our hearts ache for the coming of God’s light.
A great list of resources from Tom & Christine Sine Link
Christmas Starts With Christ – ChurchAds
ChurchAds long running campaign is “Christmas starts with Christ”. Each year they aim to retell elements of the Christmas story in a contemporary way. Last year ChurchAds focused on fashion, the year before they featured a baby scan and before that a bus stop nativity.
This year, they’re retelling the story with an eye-catching, brown-eyed Godbaby doll in a blue babygrow, with the slogan, “He cries. He wees. He saves the world.” Link
The guys down at ReJesus have a long list of resources for Christmas and Advent. ReJesus is a website designed for people who are looking for help in talking with people about Jesus and faith, the site includes puzzles, poems, spaces to ask questions, image downloads, worship, art and spirituality resources. It’s divided into 5 sections, The Story, The Encounter, The Popular Spirituality, Expressions and Community each section providing different ways to help people talk about Jesus with other people.
The Christmas resources on ReJesus includes puzzles, images, stories, fun activities and much more for you and others to connect with, go on and check them all out… Link
25 is a set of comic pages from illustrator si smith. each comic page tells an aspect of the christmas story. the speech bubbles on the pages have been left blank for you to fill in or tell the story in your own words and ways. there is also a digital advent calendar with 25 windows that are hyperlinks to the comic page of that number. as if that wasn’t enough, there are then 25 flatpack models that you can print on card, cut out and glue to make the characters that relate to the day of that number.
Worship House Media Video Clips
Worship House Media is a great website for people wanting to use multimedia resources in worship. WHM connects with multimedia producers from all over the place who provide resources in the form of movies, short films, image loops and still images for purchase and download and use in worship.
Are you wanting films or image loops for Advent? Worship House Media has a lot of resources just for you. Some of my favourite links on WHM for Christmas and Advent are:
The Advent Conspiracy – Rethinking Christmas in a Consumer Society
We all want our Christmas to be a lot of things. Full of joy. Memories. Happiness. Above all, we want it to be about Jesus. What we don’t want is stress. Or debt. Or feeling like we “missed the moment”. Advent Conspiracy is a movement designed to help us all slow down and experience a Christmas worth remembering. But doing this means doing things a little differently. A little creatively.
A great resource for people wanting to think about what they give during Christmas and for turning Christmas upside-down so as to slow down and reflect on what Christmas should really be about.
I have the Advent Conspiracy DVD kit if you’d like to borrow it. The Advent Conspiracy crew have put a number of videos & resources online for people to access as they slow pace it through Advent:
Set 1:
Set 2 (all of these are available on the AC website):
Darren Wright has curated a couple of liturgies that we’ve used in worship within presbytery gatherings.
As there has been a number of requests for copies of these liturgies from participants of these gatherings we’ve decided to add them to the worship resources on the website.
You can download the liturgies below, but you might be wondering where two of the prayers/reflection came from.
The first piece was titled “Broken & Scattered” and came from the book:
Gifts in Open Hands
More Worship Resources for the Global Community
By Maren Tirabassi & Kathy Wonson Eddy
ISBN 9780829818390
Broken & Scattered
The Ears of wheat are broken and scattered
on the hillside to grow.
Gathered, they are broken again
and scattered through the towns to make bread.
The bread is scattered to each home
and broken to give nourishment.
Broken and scattered, broken and scattered,
and some becomes the Lord’s body broken for us
as we are the people of God scattered throughout the country
and, perhaps, broken to give nourishment to others.
by Isobel de Gruchy, South Africa
The second piece, Communion Prayer, a piece I like to use in three voices came from:
Grace Pocket Liturgies
released through Proost
available as a pdf.
Communion Prayer
Word becomes flesh
flesh becomes bread
bread becomes body
body becomes word
God is bread
bread is broken
pain becomes wine
wine becomes joy
Wine bursts the wineskins
God bursts the tomb
bread bursts into song
Holy, holy, holy…
Video Prayer – The Lord’s Prayer
Just Prayers – The Lord’s Prayer (No subtitles) from mark pierson on Vimeo.
Link: A Communion Liturgy (Presbytery February 2014)
Link: A Communion Liturgy (Rural Ministry Conference 2013)
The Uniting Church currently has a number of books and resources to assist people in their ministry, books cover topics of religion, liturgy, prayer, philosophy, biblical study, theology, commentary, preaching resources and mission. at the The resource library is located at the Wagga Wagga team ministry centre. If you’d like to look at what’s in the library please download the entire book list below.
If you’d like to borrow from the library please contact the team ministry centre.
Link: Riverina Presbytery Resource Library (pdf)
An Open Letter to the Church in the Riverina,
Fair Trade has been a bit of a hobby horse for both my wife and myself over the last few years, so forgive me if you’ve heard all of this before, but please continue reading because while many of us have heard this before we as a church do not seem to be acting on it.
The call of Jesus is to be people who live in the Kingdom of God, to be in the world but to be living a lifestyle, ethic and disciplines that are of a different world, the one that we pray about when we speak the Lord’s Prayer together “May Your Kingdom Come.” This Kingdom is of a realm where each person is valued, where there is no definition between peasant and priest, where the ethics of the Kingdom reign.
The ethics that are being played in our current marketplace are far from this, it’s an ethic that places the lives of some over the lives of others, the pleasures of those who can afford it over those who cannot (or those who have to suffer in order for those pleasures to be experienced). The current empire lives by a system that if we can get away with it then it’s alright (or even it’s best-practice) to make money by making the life of another of less value than your own.
It’s not too difficult to see that many of the current market practices stand up against those of the Kingdom of God and it strikes me as a concern that many of us are not interested in, or are not willing to look into a different way of being.
As for Fair Trade, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that our excuses for not supporting it are becoming weaker.
Fair Trade in its simplest form means that companies will guarantee a set price for a number of years to communities of farmers, that way they can project their income and, in turn create a budget which allows them to afford uniforms, education, homes, staff. By working closer to these farmers the company can also see ways where they can help support the local community and also ensure that people (including children) are not trafficked as slave labor.
In it’s simplest of forms Fair Trade means that people are able to eat, plan for the future and aren’t trafficked as slaves to pick our cocoa or coffee. It’s an ethical system that offers an alternative to the one that we currently live with where our “guilty pleasure” of chocolate, coffee, tea and many other items are guilty, not because of their sugar, fat and carb content but because it is highly likely that child/slave labor was used in order to produce the item (the redefinition of the word “guilty” in order to focus on its fat/carb content rather than how it’s been produced & marketed is another topic altogether).
Why wouldn’t we want to support a model of trade that encourages companies to develop stronger relationships to their producers, to see them as people and treat them differently? If we knew the people who grew and picked our coffee, cocoa or tea perhaps we’d not have any concerns about supporting Fair Trade, (I’m reminded that only recently we in the Riverina have heard the plights of our dairy farmers wanting a fair market for their product while our supermarkets were creating a price war). Sometimes I fear that for many of us may have put the value of our luxuries above the value of the people that grow and make them.
It may not be a perfect system, but when I contemplate our prayers for the world and our neighbour during intercession, our call for the reality of God to come “on earth as it is in heaven” and what our scriptures, prophets and Jesus have said about our treatment of “the other” it’s still a much better system that removes people’s God-given worth and denigrates them as slaves and people not worth fair treatment.
I’ll finish with one last question.
What does it mean for us as disciples of Jesus to pray for God’s Kingdom to come and share of the body and blood of Christ during worship to then go and share the product of an unfair system that uses slave labour with each other in the disguise of hospitality?
Please consider this when you’re purchasing tea, coffee, chocolate and other items for your morning and afternoon tea.
Shalom,
Darren Wright