Creative Ideas For Seasonal Retreats

Build your own seasonal retreat programmes with this unique resource. Offering material for use throughout the Christian year, it uses the Church's seasons to explore the different ways that Christ meets us, the saving mysteries of each season, and the ways that the seasons resonate with varying life stages: • Advent: Beginning again • Christmas: Finding God • Epiphany: Seeing glory • Lent: Finding acceptance • Passiontide: Growing in compassion • Easter: Growing in faith • Ascensiontide: Making sense of it all • Pentecost: Sensing the Spirit • Ordinary Time: Visions of the whole. Drawing on on Scripture, Christian tradition and contemporary psychological insights such as the Enneagram, it offers two outline retreat programmes for each season, with a wide range of imaginative activities and spiritual exercises. The outlines are readily adaptable to half day, whole day or weekend retreats and are suitable for group or individually-guided retreats.

Going a day retreat or quiet day is a regular activity for many local churches. During the preparatory seasons of Advent and Lent, they are especially popular. While many retreat houses and religious communities offer a program for such days, many groups prefer a do-it yourself approach. This resource contains twelve complete day-long programs that are focused around different themes and are appropriate for use at varying times of the Christian year. It is suitable for all ages and assorted pastoral contexts. It also gives step-by-step instructions on creating your own program from scratch. Each session includes: opening worship, short talk 1, reflection exercise, short talk 2, second reflection exercise, prayers and blessings. Additionally there are leaders' notes on all practical aspects of planning and conducting such a day, from booking the venue to handout templates. This new edition comes with download able worship and reflection materials to enrich your program.

Seasons like Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter are among the busiest for clergy and leaders of worship. This addition to the popular Creative Ideas series helps you plan seasonal worship more easily with a range of easy-to-use dramas and ideas to liven up worship, all based on the lectionary readings. It includes: • dramatic readings of lectionary readings and drama sketches for all seasons of the Christian year • short and snappy dramatic dialogues exploring biblical readings from a contemporary point of view • ideas for using our worship space more creatively • ideas for non-lectionary events such as Christingle • how to write creatively for worship • CD-Rom with downloadable resources Seasons covered include Advent, Christmas, Christingle, Epiphany, Lent, Mothering Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, Harvest and Remembrance Sunday.

A resource that gives practical ideas for reflection and study based on the central Christian symbol - the cross - an endlessly rich theme against which to explore individual stories and experiences. It comes with a downloadable CD-ROM which includes templates and instruction for making hand held crosses and colour images of crosses worldwide.

A radical and controversial challenge to the top-down leadership models that are so widespread in the church, instead making the case for a new model of people-driven servant leadership, guided by the Holy Spirit towards kingdom growth rather than church growth.

Originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, this volume explores how researchers, educators, artists, and scholars can collaborate with, and engage young people in art, creative practice, and research to work towards social justice and political engagement. By critically interrogating the dominant discourses, cultural, and structural obstacles that we all face today, this volume explores the potential of critical arts pedagogies and community-based research projects to empower young people as agents of social change. Chapters offer nuanced analyses of the limits of arts-based social justice collaborations, and grapple with key ethical, practical, and methodological issues that can arise in creative approaches to youth participatory action research. Theoretical contributions are enhanced by Notes from the Field, which highlight prime examples of arts-based youth work occurring across North America. As a whole, the volume powerfully advocates for collaborative creative practices that facilitate young people to build power, hope, agency, and skills through creative social engagement. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, postgraduate students, and scholar-practitioners involved in community- and arts-based research and education, as well as those working with marginalized youth to improve their opportunities and access to a quality education and to deepen their political participation and engagement in intergenerational partnerships aiming to increase the conditions for social justice.

Holiday and Seasonal Ideas for Ministry with Young Teens is a collection of twenty-seven strategies to help young adolescents mark significant times in the liturgical and secular calendars. The collection includes prayer ideas, service projects, social and learning activities, and outreach strategies.

This collection contains ideas for two overnight retreats and four one-day retreats. The themes of the overnight retreats are self-esteem and being true to oneself; the themes of the other four retreats are Confirmation, discipleship, the Triduum, and leadership development.