Messy Writers wanted for Seasons of the Spirit

25 August 2010

If you're a creative and communicative person with a passion for Jesus, a commitment to all-age worship (of course, or you wouldn't be doing Messy Church) and lots of ideas to share, you may be interested in an opportunity to be considered for the Seasons of the Spirit writing team.

Susan Burt, the Managing Editor, emailed me from Canada recently and explains what she's looking for. So please read it through and contact her direct if you are excited by the possibility and feel you have something to offer.

I think Seasons of the Spirit is a great and imaginative resource and has lots in common with what we're trying to do in Messy Church. I'd love our networks to be able to flow into each other as Susan suggests below.

Dear Lucy,
We 'spoke' a little while ago when I 'discovered' Messy Church and its connection with families that are seeking to be formed in faith in ways other than traditional Sunday morning gatherings. Your story struck a cord with the integrated nature of Seasons of the Spirit.
Seasons of the Spirit is an ecumenical, international, lectionary based Christian education and worship resource, which is responsive to the grass roots and movement of the church. As you know there is a trend away from traditional Sunday or Church school. John Westerhoff wrote about that over 30 years ago when he spoke of it being a 'bankrupt' paradigm and spoke of a lived faith, an enculturated faith. In this, we recognize that we are formed in faith in the way we live our lives together - in the way we practice Christianity. SeasonsFUSION is a fully integrated ministry resource that assumes all ages learning, worshipping and serving together. I can say more about that later.

As a lectionary based curriculum we 'live' the rhythms of the church year, but importantly we live and celebrate the key stories of our Christian faith - Advent and the hope and vision of a re-newed world, Christmas story and the incarnation of Love, Epiphany - and revealing of Love to all; Easter; Pentecost - and the wind of change blowing across the world.
Seasons of the Spirit, whilst offering weekly worship, learning and serving resources, also seeks to offer resources for families not able to, or wanting to, participate on Sunday in the 'traditional' way, and, in terms of outreach, to offer resources that connect the church with the wider community.

This is the reason for my contact today. SeasonsFUSION is divided into quarters. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany; Lent, Easter, Season after Pentecost 1; Season after Pentecost 2. In each quarter we provide two or three all-age activities that explores specific seasons or key stories of our faith. Very similar to what you do with Messy Church. We don’t see the work that you do and we do as being mutually exclusive, rather we wonder if you would be willing to talk further about people from Messy Church writing these all-age activities. In this we could/would promote the Messy Church movement by way of web links and a printed article or articles. Through social media we could encourage dialogue and conversation with our users. Some of your users may be interested in hearing about weekly worship, learning, serving ideas from Seasons users, and Seasons users would be interested with the Messy Church movement.

Lots to talk about, but for now, would you or your writers be willing to write some outlines for times of creativity, worship and eating together? Right now, I am looking for resources to introduce Advent; Christmas story; Epiphany. Perhaps someone has already written programs that we could reproduce with appropriate credit.

I look forward to ongoing discussion and ways we might share our 'stories'.

Warm regards,
Susan Burt
Managing Editor
Seasons of the Spirit