Preaching with All Ages: Twelve ways to grow your skills and your confidence

Preaching with All Ages

Twelve ways to grow your skills and your confidence

Ally Barrett

© Ally Barrett 2019

First published in 2019 by the Canterbury Press Norwich

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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978 1 78622 171 1

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Encountering God

Introduction: Worshipping and preaching with all ages

1. Reflecting on the resurrection

2. Engaging through theological reflection

3. Reflecting on the storm and the cushion

4. Engaging through the senses

5. Reflecting on relationships

6. Engaging in different ways

7. Reflecting by the well

8. Children as theologians

9. Reflecting on the Trinity

10. Engaging with one another

11. Reflecting with stickers

12. Medium and message, process and product

13. Reflecting on scripture

14. Engaging with scripture

15. Reflecting on the Eucharist

16. Engaging with liturgy and worship

17. Reflecting on the stones

18. Engaging with church life and mission

19. Reflecting on Pentecost

20. Engaging with human experience

21. Reflecting on creation

22 . Resources

23. Reflecting on the dust and the light

Encountering God again

Further reading and resources

This book is dedicated to Sam, Joanna and Dan, without whom nothing would have been possible.

Acknowledgements

There are so many people to thank: first, Peter Moger, my training incumbent, who repeatedly pushed me off the all-age preaching cliff until I learned to fly, and the congregations who were patient with me along the way; and my students, who have put up with me trying things out on them over the past several years, and given me much-needed criticism as well as affirmation.

Thank you to the many colleagues who have shared their own experiences of all-age preaching with me so generously, who have helped shape my thinking and had the honesty to tell me when I am wrong – I am hugely grateful for their insights and wisdom, and all remaining inadequacies and errors are very much my own. Special thanks are due to those who allowed me to use their own stories and ideas in this book.

I would like to thank Christine, Mary, Hannah, Joanne and their colleagues who believed that this book was a good idea and made it happen. I’m incredibly grateful to the many friends who were willing to read draft versions and offer me helpful feedback.

Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents, who first taught me to believe that ‘someone has to do it’; my husband Sam, who taught me the value of critical thinking and perseverance; and my children, Joanna and Dan, who never stopped asking questions and in so many ways helped me to discover more of the love and mystery of God.

Encountering God

‘Did you know that God is invisible? That means we can’t see God. And did you also know that when we become invisible we’ll be able to see God then?’

My son was four years old when he explained this to me, expressing an encounter with the divine that is as profound as it is simple. It prompted me to pay closer attention to what children might be able to offer to the whole Body of Christ as we encounter God together in worship and in preaching. Without the witness of children, the Church’s encounter with God is impoverished.

As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable … If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it. (1 Corinthians 12.20–22, 26)

Introduction: Worshipping and preaching with all ages

This book is about preaching with all ages.

It’s not a book of ready-made all-age talks; there are already plenty of good books that offer this. Rather, it’s about understanding how all-age preaching is shaped by, and shapes, its context, embodying a culture in which everyone is valued. It’s also about how we can learn from our experience, growing in confidence as we open up God’s word afresh with every generation.¹

Preaching to a congregation reminds us that as preachers we carry a degree of authority bestowed by the Church and its people to share God’s good news.

Preaching for a congregation reminds us that sharing this wisdom must take into account the needs of the whole people of God.

Preaching with a congregation facilitates an encounter with God, drawing on everyone’s diverse experiences and gifts to discern God’s purposes together.

Preaching to and preaching for are well understood as essential to all forms of preaching, so one of the main purposes of this book is to explore what the idea of preaching with adds to our understanding, and what it looks like in real life, including:

Making room for questions, ideas, doubts and surprises.

Attending to people’s hopes and fears, gifts and needs.

Opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit as we explore the riches of God’s word.

Creating a hospitable space in which all people can contribute and be heard.

Sharing some of our own power by empowering others.

Discovering our ability to make connections and draw out fruitful themes.

Setting preaching in the context of worship, church life, community and God’s world.

Growing in confidence as we learn to trust God, the congregation and ourselves.

Worshipping together

Preaching isn’t a stand-alone activity: it’s part of worship. What does it mean to worship together? All-age worship – now more commonly called ‘intergenerational worship’ – is on the increase. Many denominations provide liturgical material for intergenerational congregations, in most local churches at least some services have children and adults worshipping, learning and growing together. Yet in some places it still feels counter-cultural, so it’s worth reminding ourselves why it matters – and the variety of motivations that may lie behind worshipping together.

‘All-age worship is normal’

‘All who believed were together and had all things in common … Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.’ (Acts 2.44–46)

Church is one of the few contexts in western culture where all ages regularly gather.

Church can be an opportunity for families to do something together.

If we assume that worshipping together is normal, any segregation (by age or other factors) has to be for a good reason and for everyone’s benefit.

Worshipping together helps us learn about one another’s gifts and needs, and balance these so that everyone can flourish within the Body of Christ in all its diversity.

‘All-age worship builds community’

‘We started a monthly all-age service, and encouraged the children to take leadership roles, such as serving or playing in the band, leading the prayers and reading, or helping on the sound desk.’

When all ages worship and open up the word of God together we learn from one another.

Worshipping and learning together can help dispel the idea that worship is an adult activity while learning is for children.²

Intergenerational activities (including worship) foster mutual support on the journey of faith.

Worshipping together helps children to ‘take their place within the life and worship of Christ’s Church’,³ so that when they grow out of Sunday school they don’t grow out of church.

‘All-age worship is missional’

Intergenerational worship can attract families to church – they can come as they are.

‘Go … and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ (Matthew 28.19)

Building links with local schools and nurseries, and good follow-up after baptisms, can grow all-age congregations.

Churches that still have a ‘parade’ service that includes children’s uniformed organizations can involve those children and leaders in planning the worship.⁴

We can connect with the secular calendar as well as the church calendar, focusing on issues and themes that resonate with our community.

We might need to review how we worship to ensure that services are accessible to those who aren’t used to church.

‘All-age worship is practical’

Worshipping with all ages together can be a practical response to a lack of resources, personnel or venue for children’s groups.

The service may not be very different from what would have been designed for an adult congregation – children simply join in.

‘We used to just have a corner at the back with some old toys in it, then we introduced more art materials, and gradually replaced the old toys with ones that encouraged the children’s participation, such as toy communion sets, colouring book versions of the service sheet, and teddies that you could dress to look like the vicar.’

Children may have parallel activities in the pews or a children’s corner – these can be related to what’s going on in the worship.⁵

Children are warmly welcomed, sharing in the ordinary life of a congregation, helping give out hymn books, lighting candles, ringing the bell, and so on – they are formed in the faith by ‘osmosis’ and by the example of the adults around them.

No two all-age congregations are the same. Churches that would love to have a children’s group may end up worshipping together due to lack of resources, while churches that desperately want to worship intergenerationally may struggle to make it work for everyone. The worship may be fully intergenerational or may (deliberately or accidentally) prioritize one age group over another – it’s well worth looking critically at our worship to see if this is happening. There may always be the same children there, or it may vary from week to week – and sometimes there may not be any children there at all.

There’s an important principle here, which may help you work out how to approach the task of preaching with all ages.

‘If your talk doesn’t work without the children, it’s not all-age.’

Mary Hawes, the Church of England’s National Adviser for Children and Youth

All-age preachers

All-age preaching is not the same as preaching for children. It is preaching that genuinely seeks to open up the word of God to a congregation in which there may be any combination of toddlers and teenagers, long-retired elderly and energetic 80-year-olds, working and non-working adults with or without partners and children, in such a way that those diverse people can encounter God together. No wonder preaching with all ages can feel so daunting.

If you find it hard, remember this: for many people – including young families – it’s really hard just getting to church. By making it to the service, they’ve already gone the extra mile. If we have children in church, it’s because someone in their life believes it’s worth them being there. Preaching and planning worship that takes their needs and gifts into account really matters: it communicates how glad we are that they have come, and through it we can offer to the whole diverse Body of Christ an experience of intergenerational community that perhaps only the Church can provide.

My own denomination, the Church of England, places high value on preaching and is quite guarded about who may preach regularly. It expects its preachers to have the capacity to understand and interpret scripture, theological tradition and human experience, and to integrate these in such a way that the gospel is proclaimed afresh in every generation, nourishing God’s people in their journey of life and faith and speaking prophetically into the complexity of the contemporary world.

In some churches, preaching with all ages is described as ‘giving a talk’, perhaps to differentiate it from what that church considers to be ‘proper’ preaching, and to open it up to those who might not otherwise be authorized to preach. This book aims to raise the profile of preaching with all ages – it is just as important as any other kind of preaching, and deserves to be well resourced and well respected.

Whatever your context, you’re probably reading this book because you’re already involved in all-age preaching and want to increase your confidence, or because your church is about to try this for the first time or develop it in a new direction. Here are some of the most common concerns that this book tries to help with – maybe some of these resonate with you.

‘But all-age preaching is scary’

Preaching an all-age sermon may take you well outside your comfort zone. All-age preaching is often delegated to people who may not feel qualified, resourced or called to do it. But the Bible is full of stories of people whom God called out of their comfort zone: Abraham, Moses, David, Mary, Peter … We know their stories because they rose to the challenge and, with God’s help, faced their fears. Maybe this is the leap of faith that God is asking of you, if you can ‘get comfortable with being uncomfortable’.⁶