This article is a part of a series about using Play Kits in Worship. Read part one of the series here.
Introduction
One idea for helping kids follow along with the worship service is to create worship toolkits. These can be customized to fit your church’s worship service, regardless of tradition. Read about the worship toolkits children’s minister Kelli Dunn created for her church. Because Kelli worships at a Christian Reformed Church where they follow a liturgical style of worship, she called her kits “Liturgical Toolkits,” but you can call your collection of worship items whatever fits your context best! What might this idea look like in your context?
What’s in a Liturgical Toolkit?
These small cloth bags contain one item for each portion of our liturgy (order of service), along with a ring of cards that explain the connection between the item and the liturgy and the enduring understanding we want to hold onto for that portion of the liturgy. Below, I share a list of the items we use, the connection, and the enduring understanding.
The items we use are:
Call to Worship – Plastic Linking Chains
Connection: Just like the chain links, we are joined together and to God when God calls us to worship.
Enduring Understanding: Through the Call to Worship, God awakens us and invites us into his presence, individually and together, and we respond to his invitation through our worship.
Singing – Ribbon Rings
Connection: Like these colorful strands joined together, our voices and instruments join together and create a beautiful way to tell of God’s majesty and wonder.
Enduring Understanding: Through singing, we join our voices as ONE church, giving praise to ONE God with ONE message – God is our King and deserves our praise and worship.
Call to Confession/Assurance of Pardon – LED Drawing Board
Connection: Our confession of sin can be expressed in words or pictures for God to see, and then we can trust that they are completely erased by God.
Enduring Understanding: The truth of God’s word calls us to acknowledge our own sin, and we confess our sin in prayer, both together and alone, even as we are assured of the mercy and forgiveness of God.
Passing the Peace – Heart Stickers
Connection: We can share God’s love and peace through a hug, handshake, high five, or even a sticker that can stay with us and remind us of our church family.
Enduring Understanding: God has given us peace – with him and with each other – and the first place we get to practice this peace is at church, acknowledging that we are a family of God, and we are filled with God’s love and peace.
Prayers of the People – Marble Labyrinth
Connection: Prayer involves both talking and listening. So, talk to God as you move the marble in, and listen to what God might be saying as you move the marble out.
Enduring Understanding: Because of God’s mercy and forgiveness, we are all invited into his presence to bring our prayers – of praise, thankfulness, lament, and request. And our prayers become not just our own individual prayers but Prayers of all the People.
Sermon – Story Boxes (see below)
Connection: By retelling, imagining and wondering, we can know and enter into God’s stories represented in these story boxes.
Enduring Understanding: The scriptures are opened, and we hear a sermon in order to reveal God’s story in the past, to participate in the present story and to anticipate God’s story in the future. The sermon makes Christ present to us and allows us to enter into His story.
Communion – Small Cup and Foam Bread
Connection: Just like Jesus gave real bread and wine to his disciples to touch and eat, we can retell and remember the story by breaking the bread and pouring out the cup.
Enduring Understanding: In communion, the bread and wine give us God’s grace in a form we can see and touch, and it reminds us of the grace we received through Jesus’ death on the cross when He gave His body and blood.
Benediction – Gyroscope Fidget Spinner
Connection: We are sent out to our separate directions to live out the Gospel in different ways, but we all stay connected to our central identity in Christ, just like the outside rings of the gyroscope move their own way but are focused around the common center.
Enduring Understanding: Just as we were called to worship, we are now sent out to carry our worship into our daily lives with the blessing of God who promises His pardon, presence, power, and peace.
Your Turn!
Think about it!
- Reflect: What are the main parts of your church’s worship service?
- Collaborate: Talk with your pastor and worship leader about the purpose of each part of
your worship service. Can you work together to create a simple phrase that explains how that part of worship is meant to form people? - Brainstorm: What item might represent each part?
- Plan: How will you introduce the tools and communicate? To read more about how Kelli did this at her church, read her article Play Kits in Worship.
- Create: Get a group together and have fun creating the kits!
Tips for Implementing this at Your Church
No one item represents each part of the liturgy, and every church’s “toolkit” will look different, depending on your regular worship service.
One of the things I have learned – and struggled through – along the way is that, while we designed these for kids, we are also equipping parents with the language and the tools to talk about worship. So the more we can model what to say and how to use these tools, the more they are used. Rolling these out 1 week at a time helped us to model what they were and why we use them, and it helped orient our view of them as tools rather than toys.
Because we only use them in the summertime when we don’t have regular programming, I plan to begin incorporating them into our Children and Worship center several weeks before summer to help remind the kids about what they are and why we use them.
Guest Author
-
Kelli Dunn
Kelli Dunn taught various grades from Kindergarten to High School for over a decade and now serves as the Director of Children’s Faith Formation at her church in Milwaukee, WI. Kelli thoughtfully designs experiences that will help create a culture where children are valued and embraced as a valuable part of the church.