Thriving Mennonite Church

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 Opening Hearts, and we explore the scriptures of Joel 2:12–13, 28–29 and Luke 11:13. I have to admit that I struggled a bit with this theme, because it just felt a little uninspired to me – it’s fairly vague. Thankfully, there are lots of good seasonal resources for this time of year.

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.

I decided to check out some of the new advent devotionals that came out in 2024 that were available to borrow through CommonWord, so I started with that this week. 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 an activity around making evergreen wreaths (which I adapted to paper), on p. 26 of this lovely title. Apparently, it’s a German Lutheran tradition – which is very culturally relevant for our geographical area, so I thought it was a nice fit for advent.

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.

For this craft, I provided strips of paper and paper rings cut from construction paper I got from Michael’s with a 30% off coupon (total cost ended up being about $6, and I found a Crayola pack that had two shades of green paper).

Next, I decided to look at my Bookmarks folder, thinking that some of the popular places I normally look for affordable resources might have some new materials for advent. I found a beautiful advent scripture deck from One Dog Woof that I printed as a take-home (free).

From Sermons for Kids, I found a great children’s bulletin for advent, on the very Mennonite theme of “waiting and watching” (free).

And the Flanders Family Home Life blog has a WEALTH of holiday resources – I ended up going with a Christmas IQ quiz, and I loved the simplicity of this “5 Things I Don’t Want to Miss This Christmas” worksheet – it felt like a great tool to focus advent energy at what can be such a hectic time (all free).