Thriving Mennonite Church

As I type this, I can hardly believe that it’s advent season already. It’s snowing, I just came from buying a holiday gift for a friend, and our church’s kids’ club is downstairs making pizzas! 2024 has been a big year, and I only hope that the next few weeks of our spiritual life will be a fitting close to it all.

Our congregation uses the Menno Media worship resources during the season of Advent, and this year’s theme is Together on the Journey. For the first week of advent, the title is Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and we explore the scriptures of Daniel 6:6–27 and Luke 23:1–5.

We also choose an organization during advent to support with our congregational offerings, and this season we’ve chosen The Nazareth Center for Peace Studies. I’ve tried to integrate peace-related resources into the activity table every week because of that, with a specific focus on the conflict in Palestine. I found a great bunch of free resources for kids through an organization called Ummah that has a Google drive where they can be downloaded. For weeks 1, 2, and 4 of advent, I drew on their resources for this purpose.

Since it is the first Sunday of advent, I included the Visual Faith Ministry advent pathways for 2024 for those who choose to partake in this ritual (free).

I also included a free colouring sheet from Southern Lotus’ Christmas Times book depicting an animal character sewing a holiday quilt, which can be downloaded from their website (free option), and throughout advent I will be including some wholesome colouring sheets that are available mostly for free from a fantastic artist, Morgan O’Brien. For this season, I drew largely on the free Matchstick Mouse Merry Little Christmas, and the Matchstick Mouse 25 Days of Kindness book.

As someone who was raised Anglican, I sometimes struggle with the reflective and almost sombre nature of Mennonite advent. Particularly with the geopolitical climate that we’re in right now, I was a bit disheartened to see this initial theme as an advent offering. However, the suggestion of the scripture of the story of Daniel and the Lion was inspiring to me. Ultimately, it is a story about an immigrant overcoming oppression through his faith, and toppling corrupt power structures. I decided to focus on that scripture as the central theme for this week’s activity table.

Daniel in the Lion’s Den story sequencing worksheet (cut and paste) from Preschool Praise on TPT (free).

I also turned to a resource that I purchased at my local Mennonite bookstore, the Super Sized Book of Bible Coloring and Art. If you follow this page, you will know that I last used this for a week that was about wisdom and King Solomon. This is a fantastic resource, because although you have to pay for it, it has perforated pages and grants the original purchaser the right to photocopy from it. There were several great pages about Daniel in this book.

Finally, I decided to check out some of the new advent devotionals that came out in 2024 that were available to borrow through CommonWord. Comfort and Joy by Sherah-Leigh Gerber and Gwen Lantz ended up being an uplifting, age inclusive book, so I hope that they won’t mind that I decided to provide copies of a couple of select offerings from the book on the activity table, with a QR code provided so that others could find the book through the library service if they wanted to read the whole thing. For this week, I chose a section on Releasing Expectations, on p. 36 of this lovely title.

A New Christmas Book: Holy Night and Little Star

A new picture book came out this year that I decided to borrow from Common Word to check out as a possibility for my own collection and for our church library – and it totally blew me away. It’s called Holy Night and Little Star, by Mitali Perkins and illustrated by Khoa Le. This is one of those books that’s a perfect gem of artwork, and I think everyone should own it. It’s a lovely variation on the Christmas story, packed with celestial imagery and inspiration, and it’s stunningly illustrated, with lots of metallic touches. I want to highly recommend adding it to your seasonal collections and requesting it at your libraries!