smallhobbit | Local Events

Continuing on with last month's theme, I'm once again talking about an activity within our church.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has played a major part in our lives this past week. I'm a republican (small R) and have no particular interest, other than noting a change of monarch. I also appreciate that for some people this has made a major impact, which should be acknowledged. However I do not appreciate being told how I should be feeling when I quite simply don't.

That being said, the Church of England, being the state church has a role it has to play. Fortunately, since Family Praise is outside the prescribed list of services, we were much freer to incorporate how we responded, so we simply had a small stone cairn before a portrait of the queen, and we invited everyone who wanted to come forward and add a stone to the cairn. Everyone did. I then read one of the prayers written by the CofE in their Prayers in Direct Language (ie family friendly, which for once they were) and then we sang 'God Save the King'. Given that one of the families who attended are an army family, I felt we were at the right level.

We then continued with the main theme of the service, which was 'New' - new term/class etc, new service time, even a new monarch. We planted cress seeds on cotton wool in egg boxes, which people took home and we hope to see photos of the growing cress next month.

We also have a tree to which we started adding leaves in the form of coloured thumbprints. Even the baby got to have her thumbprint on there.

After which we invited everyone to write one new thing on a piece of green card, something which they might be feeling a bit nervous about, or which they are looking forward to. These were then laid out and prayed over.