The Big Easter Egg Hunt

Imagine an activity that is guaranteed to bring 12-15 families with small children to your church for a relatively easy-to-do event.  Imagine that the event itself spurs interests in other church activities and even prompts questions about the time for the next day’s worship. Sounds perfect. right? It does unless you are the preacher and you worry about what having an Easter egg hunt between Good Friday and Easter says theologically about what you are doing.

When I got here I was told that they always have THE EASTER EGG HUNT, with hundreds of small children. Of course the crowd was smaller than that, a lot smaller. Everything is smaller than we remember in a small church. We seldom saw the families who came at other events either. The folks who ran it did a wonderful job, but they were not going to be able to do it this year. In my heart of hearts, I was delighted.  We are too small to expend lots of effort into areas that do not bring interested visitors.  That, and my theological problem was resolved.

Then one of the moms, with three children of egg gathering age, said that she would like to run the hunt this year. So much for the theological issue.  The hunt was back. She did a great job with help from others. It was a smashing success.  Every child went home with enough candy to stay awake until Easter morning.  We had lots of baked goodies from Celebration Food, and coffee for the parents on a surprisingly cold spring morning.

So the children had fun and may continue to associate Easter with eggs. What then, theologically, can we say in our defense?

The borough has an egg hunt which has about 3 eggs per child.  We had about 40 per child. Score 1 for God. God is generous.

The borough’s event is a battle of speed and tenacity. At our place, all children, no matter how young or slow,  got more candy than they have teeth. Another 1 for God. God shows no partiality.

If Easter is about rising from death’s door, nothing says rebirth like happy youngsters.

Besides, God can still work it out by giving me a really good Easter sermon.

Ups and Downs

We had our Christian Family Seder on Saturday night. The food was great, courtesy of Celebration Food.  The liturgy was faithful to our understanding of the Exodus experience and a great send-off to Holy week.  Alas, we set up the room to bring forty around a single table, when it would have been far more intimate and appropriate to have been prepared for twenty. So, I was a little down.

But what a difference a night makes.  We had a great crowd for Palm Sunday.  One of our young couples was here with their baby, and we will be having a baptism soon. A young man from our congregation played the guitar and sang. Wonderfully.  We even had one of those special moments in our Chilren’s message.  Do you know what is special about today? Yes, it is April Fools’s Day.  God bless.  Days like these make you love a wee kirk. And you know God loves the wee kirk, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many.

Children’s Sermons

One of the hardest but most rewarding parts of worship is the children’s sermon. We have two faithful young ones and others who are present sporadically. The children’s message fills our congregation with life and imparts simple lessons to these little ones. As they grow up, we will be able to have longer and more complex messages, but for now, we keep it simple!

See our new page on Children’s Sermons when you have a week that might like a new idea. And be sure to look over the Easter message – it was a big hit!!

Basketball Children’s Message

I do not always do the children’s message.  In fact, I do not do it more that once a month.  One of the high shool teens does it, another elder does it, and my wife frequently does it.  But today I had the children’s message.

Perhaps it is from all of my sermon preparation over the NCAA tournament, but today the theme was basketball.

I blew up several beach balls (less trouble if they bounce off, and they will bounce off.) I made a large basket with my arms  and let the children shoot the balls through the basket from several feet away.  Easy enough.  Then I made the basket smaller, and the balls no longer went through my arms. I went back to the bigger basket, but moved further away. Again fewer balls went through.  I moved up the steps of the chancel making the basket further away and higher. Again the children had less success. Finally I moved closer with my basket spread wide.

The basket is like God’s loving arms.  God’s love is big love, and God’s love is always near.  Life is hard when God seems small and far away.

It is not a bad message for adults either.