We often get asked about Halloween resources at this time of year. We don’t have anything in our range about Halloween, because there are plenty of other organisations producing materials on those themes. If you’re looking for resources or are planning to run an alternative event in your church, here are a couple of ideas:

The Church of England has teamed up with The Children’s Society to produce Halloween Choice. Drawing on the legacy of All Saints’ Day, the initiative has launched a National Hero Hunt. Ideas, posters and flyers, and school and church resources are available from the dedicated website at Halloweenchoice.org. 

Another popular alternative to Halloween events is the ‘Light Party’. CPO produce posters and resources for these. You can also register your Light Party with the New Zealand-based Light Party trust, and download resources from their site.

Christian Aid have launched their Christmas resources for the year, based around the theme of ‘hope’, and featuring these colourful graphics. The package of downloads includes a film, posters, and Sunday school activities.

Operation Noah has launched an advent initiative for 2008 calling for ‘reclaiming christmas‘. As a response to the increasing consumerism of the Christmas season, they are suggesting a series of events for the first weekend of December, all about sustainability, and simpler living. Activities will include special services, present-making workshops, and clean-up operations around shopping centres. Several cathedrals will be taking part, including Birmingham, who recently hosted SGM Lifewords‘ Space Encounters prayer stations.

For more about the project, click here. Resources include liturgy and prayers, and check back soon for their alternative Christmas play, described as ‘Dr Who meets Dickens’ A Christmas Carol’. The project will be launched formally on 11th November with a lecture from Abbot Christopher Jamison, best known for the BBC series ‘The Monastery’, and the book ‘Finding Sanctuary’ (a book a number of us at SGM Lifewords have read and enjoyed.) Jamison introduces the idea:

“Advent is the traditional month of preparation before Christmas, a time of fasting and intense prayer, a time of eager expectation. It is above all a time to celebrate waiting as a normal part of human experience, when the Christian tradition invites us to wait for the birth of a child. In Advent we rejoice that we are waiting, that there is still time to prepare a way for the Lord and we celebrate the virtue of patience. By contrast, the consumer world tells us not to wait but to ‘buy now.’ Greed cannot wait, so to learn to wait is a simple antidote to greed.”

Operation Noah is the climate change initiative from Christian Ecology Link and Churches Together’ Environmental Issues Network.

A church in Scotland hosted an exhibition this month on ‘The Church Past and Present’. For the past, Church of Scotland Tayport drew together items from its history, such as a 1920’s wedding dress and baptismal registers, and presented them to the public. For the present, visitors were invited to tour the building and explore the meaning of the architecture, and to respond to the spirituality of the space through interactive installations drawn from SGM Lifewords‘ Space Encounters resource.

“We set it up a ‘Prayer Pool’” said Rev Colin Dempster. “Visitors were encouraged to say a prayer and write it on the paper boats, which they then floated in the pool. We also set up a locked prayer box for people to put prayers in for our Prayer secretary; this was well used. Our prayer is that this will encourage others to not only think about prayer, but to get in touch themselves with the ‘Hearer of all our prayers’.” Visitors also toured the building using the Look Around You leaflet from SGM Lifewords.

Space Encounters is a series of four prayer stations designed for use in historic churches. You can download full instructions and resources here.

A recent report from the University of Warwick suggests cathedrals may serve Christian visitors better than non-Christian visitors. In a survey at St David’s Cathedral in Wales, the research team found that visitor experiences were quite different between those who professes Christian beliefs, and those who did not.

Visitor satisfaction was very high among regular church attenders - 97% said they found the cathedral inviting, 95% said it was uplifting, 87% ‘awe-inspiring’ and 77% said they felt a sense of God’s presence. Among those who did not attend church regularly, 88% found it inviting, 77% ‘inviting’, 68% ‘awe-inspiring’. Just 18% felt a sense of God’s presence.

This may not be particularly surprising, considering visitors pre-dispositions. For Christians, cathedrals can be a place of deep spiritual significance, whereas casual visitors may consider them buildings of primarily historic or architectural interest. However, the survey also covered the cathedral shop. Christian visitors were much more likely to purchase something, and to approve of the overall range. 74% appreciated the range on offer, and 55% made a purchase. Only 41% of non-Christian visitors thought the shop offered a good range, and just 31% bought something.

This is perhaps more telling, the researchers suggest, as it shows the cathedrals’ target market is skewed towards Christians, and positions the cathedral as serving Christian needs first. “This strategy,” says author Emyr Williams, “misses the great challenge held out by the Archbishops’ Commission on Cathedrals of engaging in their mission of teaching, evangelising and welcome among secular tourists. More problematic still is the implication of the finding that the focus of the cathedral shop is symptomatic of the positioning of the whole cathedral which seems to understand the secular visitor so much less adequately than it understands the pilgrim.”

As we have discovered in our own research for our Historic Churches programme, each cathedral has its own approach for reaching out to visitors. Some have produced audio tours, invested in multimedia elements, or commissioned new artworks. Others run regular, easily accessible services at various points in the day. Some have experimented with special events, from late night opening at the weekends to spirituality fairs or Narnia theme days. Whatever the individual response has been, most cathedrals recognise that the needs of pilgrims and tourists need to be held in balance. This was notable at the Mission Shaped Cathedral event, which saw dozens of cathedrals represented at a consultation in Coventry to discuss the unique role of their buildings in mission.

This is a conversation we are engaged in ourselves at SGM Lifewords. Our Historic Churches programme aims to help churches to think through the welcome offered to visitors, at whatever stage of faith they may be. Our prayer cards are designed to facilitate prayer for those who are perhaps unfamiliar with praying. The Look Around You card is a fold-out tour of any church building, that leads visitors around the building, using the architectural features as cues for reflection. Each title was developed in consultation with practitioners, and several cathedrals are using these materials already, including Manchester, Oxford and Coventry. We are also developing interactive prayer stations, offering visitors a point of response to what they see, hear and feel while in the ’sacred space’ of a church building. We are still exploring the many ways to use church buildings in mission, but we would hope that wherever the conversation takes us, secular tourists as well as pilgrims would encounter God in our historic churches.

• The full report is entitled Visitor experiences of St David’s Cathedral: the two worlds of pilgrims and secular tourists. It was first published in the Rural Theology journal.

Archbishop Rowan Williams gave an interesting lecture last week on The Spiritual and the Religious, articulating the differences between religion as “a matter of the collective mentality”, and the spiritual as that which “opens up and resources personal integrity at a new depth,” and allows “ordinary human activities to be understood afresh against a broader background of ’sacred’ meaning.”

The trend in our culture today is away from the structures and requirements of religion, to the more open territories of spirituality. It is a shift “away from the idea of a controlling narrative, a story about shared meanings and goals.”

Part of the problem, says Williams, is that religion is understood in power terms, as a matter of one truth over another. As a matter of thought, conviction and decision, this makes faith a private matter - a collection of personal conclusions that have little impact on public life. But this is not the way religion used to be viewed:

“Traditional styles of religious commitment were nothing much to do with resolving to think or do this or that: they were environments in which people were supplied with a set of possible roles within a comprehensive narrative, a set of possible projects shaped by the governing story. The aim of life was to act in a way that lets the story come through, that shows to the world what we believe is most real.”

Williams does not condemn the modern search for spiritual connection as a distraction. Neither does he seek to defend Christianity as a set of truths to be propagated. Rather, he advocates an understanding of ourselves as a community with a different story.

“The Christian alternative to the post-religious spirituality outlined earlier is not simply ‘religion’ as some sort of intellectual and moral system but the corporately experienced reality of the Kingdom, the space that has been cleared in human imagination and self-understanding by the revealing events of Jesus’ life.”

• You can read the whole lecture here, or watch a video here.

When we started our historic churches initiative, many practitioners suggested that we try and produce a generic church tour leaflet. Many churches have lots of visitors, but do not have the time or the expertise to create guides to the church building, or specific visitor materials.

Look Around You is our response - a guided walk around any church building on a pocket-sized fold-out card, using prayers and reflections to help visitors to engage with the spirituality of the place.

Look Around You is available to order now, and is already in use in a number of churches and cathedrals. To stock up before the summer season, visit our online ordering pages here.

Multimedia elements can really add an extra dimension to Christmas services and events, but they tend to be very dependent on willing volunteers, and sometimes a cobbled together powerpoint presentation is worse than no presentation at all.

We’ve got a little bundle of things ready to go - including powerpoint presentations for storytelling or background visuals, and blank powerpoint templates to match, ready for your notices or lyrics. They’re all free to download, and you’re welcome to adapt them as you like to suit your own context.

We know how busy it can get planning for Christmas, and typing out a list of Christmas carols is not a task to look forward to. We’ve taken the liberty of typing some up for you.

If you’ve got a carol service coming up, or are going carolling in the streets, download our instant carol sheet and print off as many as you need.

It’s a word document, so you can just remove any songs you don’t want, and enter any we haven’t thought of.

The Church of England has launched a application on the networking site Facebook, encouraging users to send virtual Christmas cards.

“I think this is a brilliant idea,” says Rt Revd Pete Broadbent, Bishop of Willesden. “Like a number of my clergy and hundreds of their parishioners, I’ve got a page on Facebook. It’s a quick and easy way for people to stay in touch and the Church needs to use websites like this to reach out to as many people as possible.”

Facebook users can see the cards here. Non Facebook users will have to make do with the press release from the CofE.