Messy Easter

Chocolate bunnies, marshmallow chicks, colored eggs, and baskets are a lot of fun, but is that really what this season is all about? The new resource Messy Easter offers your church a tool to bring together people of all ages and stages of faith for a unique come-as-you-are experience of creativity—allowing space for all to play and create celebration—worshiping God and his redeeming work in Jesus hospitality—sharing a meal where all are welcome These three once-a-month sessions include ideas for activities, games, crafts, food, and much more to help us learn about Lent, Holy Week, and Easter in an excitedly messy way! This season, give your community the gift of a Messy Church! The Messy Church series provides resources to help your church bring together people of all ages and stages of faith, allowing them to experience a creative and fun-filled Christian community.

Christmas can be complicated. Parties, gifts, and family tensions dominate the season. So maybe it's time we explore what Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany are really about. The Messy Church series provides resources to help your church bring together people of all ages and stages of faith, allowing them to experience a creative and fun-filled Christian community. Messy Christmas offers your church a tool to create a unique, come-as-you-are experience built on creativity—allowing space for all to play and create celebration—worshiping God and his redeeming work in Jesus hospitality—sharing a meal where all are welcome These three once-a-month sessions include Christmas prayers, global action suggestions, games and competitions, Christmas food crafts, and many other ideas to experience joy during this time of the year. This season, give your community the gift of a messy church!

Chocolate bunnies, colored eggs, and baskets are a lot of fun, but is that really what this season is all about? Messy Easter offers your church a tool to bring together people of all ages and stages of faith for a unique come-as-you-are experience of creativity, celebration, and hospitality. These three once-a-month sessions help us learn more about Lent, Holy Week, and Easter in an excitedly messy way!

“Endlessly surprising.… Like the egg itself, this book is a perfect, miraculous package.” —Mary Roach, best-selling author of Fuzz An unconventional history of the world’s largest cellular workhorse, from chickens to penguins, from art to crime, and more. The egg is a paradox—both alive and not alive—and a symbol as old as culture itself. In this wide-ranging and delightful journey through its natural and cultural history, Lizzie Stark explores the egg’s deep meanings, innumerable uses, and metabolic importance through a dozen dazzling specimens. From Mali to Finland, mythologies around the globe have invested the egg with powers of regeneration and fecundity, often ascribing the origin of the world to a cosmic egg. An oracle to Romans, fought over by Gold Rush gangs, used as the foundation of the Clown Egg Registry, and blasted into space, the egg has taken on larger proportions than, say, the ovum of an ostrich. It has starred in global dishes from the Korean comfort food ttukbaegi gyeranjjim to the less regaled yet iconic soft-boiled egg. Stark writes a biography of French-born chef Jacques Pépin through his egg creations, and weaves in her personal experiences, like attempting to make the perfect omelet or trying her hand at pysanky—the Ukrainian art of egg decoration. She also explores her fraught relationship to the eggs in her body due to a familial link to cancer, and shares her delight in becoming a mother. Filled with colorful characters and fascinating morsels, Egg is playful, informative, and guarantees that you’ll never take this delicate ovoid for granted again.

Three complete sessions for Lent, Holy Week and Easter, together with a wealth of activities to extend the range of excitingly messy activities for your Messy Church - creative prayers, games, food crafts, and ideas for organising an Easter trail.

A simple shift in thinking can change everything you believe about your own happiness. By the time we become adults, most of us have joined the religion of suffering, which preaches that unless circumstances are controlled, life will be a mess. We compare ourselves to others and speculate about an impossible-to-know future, holding out hope for an improved life through getting ahead, fulfilling passion, or finding true love. But the idea that happiness comes from putting effort toward altering one’s circumstances is harmful and backward. What if we instead learned to understand that circumstances can rarely be controlled, and that life is, and always will be, messy? From that starting point, we could learn to use our minds to create happiness despite life’s ever-changing circumstances and events. Life’s Messy, Live Happy by Cy Wakeman is about dramatically changing the level of happiness you feel in your daily life, by learning to disconnect happiness from external forces, stop worrying about the future, and realize that most of your negative feelings are about things that never even happened. Wakeman is a credible, relatable teacher—a business owner, mother, and community member who has lived her philosophy and achieved profound happiness and success in a crazy, messy life. Filled with concrete daily practices and true stories that are hilarious, painful, and poignant, this book will change everything: your perspective, your focus, and your energy level for everyday life.

How will it all end? Come, dear reader, and join with the good and the bad of the Diocese of Lindchester as they navigate their way through the storms of 2016. What does the year hold in this best of times, this worst of times; this season of bake-offs and food banks, of muscular theological hope and hand-wringing theological despair? We will peep through many a stained-glass window in pursuit of answers. Will the new bishop - dubbed Steve-angelical by his detractors - impose the evils of management on the timeless beauty of Anglicanism? Will kind Dean Marion collude with him? Will Archdeacon Matt be the next bishop of Barcup - and what will Jane think of that? And will Freddie - more lovely than a summer's day, though far less temperate - finally find love and happiness? Times are dark in this, the final volume of the Lindchester Chronicles, but we may yet glimpse a touch of radiance around the grubby edges of our characters. So let us soar as best we can on Anglican wings, towards those unseen Realms of Glory. 'Catherine Fox's glorious Lindchester series is the twenty-first-century answer to Trollope's Barchester - but Trollope was never so funny, so fundamentally kind, or so mischievously attentive to grace.' Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill