Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Curate's Surprise!

No..not a new kind of cocktail, nor even an ice-cream sundae, but the heading for this week's session with the Youth Group. A long long time ago, I apparently agreed to provide some sort of game/activity/think spot for this coming Sunday...the surprise element, I imagine, was not intended to reflect my degree of preparedness for this, but, as is the way of things, a little ambiguity spices up the mixture.
Faced last Sunday with the realisation that it was coming up next week (how on earth did that happen??) I went into free-fall panic mode and then decided that this must be the moment to try a teeny weeny bit of an experiment.
So...the Curate's Surprise will be "Into the desert: a interactive Prayer Trail for Lent" (not a labyrinth in the end...no space to lay one out, due to overabundance of our blessed pews, and insufficient time to do so anyway, as I can't begin till the last soul has left after Evensong). To-day's surprise is how very rewarding I've found it trawling through resources (where would anyone be without jonny or sue ?), planning and praying till it feels as if I've something that God wants to use with those teens. Those of you well-versed in alt.worship would be totally underwhelmed by the whole thing, but this will be my first attempt at putting something like this together and it will certainly be an unknown quantity for most of the community here. Many of the youth group are largely there for the football... Prayers for Sunday evening would be much appreciated.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't sell yourself short. The beauty of alt worship is the care and attention to detail that goes into it. I'm sure what you have planned will be delightful :)

Anonymous said...

just a thought - I did a "trail" last Lent as there wasn't space for a Labyrinth, and descovered that it was possible to set up some installations quite unobtrusively in advance, and then connect them up with the "trail" once service times were over.

good luck! sure it will be fab, however it turns out...