“The story of Christ’s birth is a subversive story of an upside-down kingdom” says the introduction to Advent Conspiracy. “It’s a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love that is still changing the world to this day. So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists. And when it’s all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling that we somehow missed its purpose.”

If you and your church want to take a stand against the empty consumerism of the modern Christmas without coming across as spoilsports, Advent Conspiracy have a load of useful resources. There are sermon notes, posters and flyers, and a whole website of alternative gift ideas at rethinkingchristmas.org.

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.

An unusual Bible website launched today aiming to help people memorise verses by setting them to music. The team behind Walking Bible have penned 875 mini-songs for downloading and inserting into iPod playlists, each with a distinctive lomographic image to accompany it.

“Research shows that most people know some 2000 songs off by heart but not many people know a poem or a verse” says founder Stefan Oberg. “So we have created a tool which uses music and images to help people memorise Bible verses.”

The service is available free of charge at walkingbible.com, in English and Swedish, with more languages coming soon.

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The Christmas site for 2008 is now live. Click here for booklets, powerpoints, downloadable invites and posters, service outlines and school assemblies, and lots more.

We’ll be adding more resources over the next few weeks, so check back often. If there’s something you think is missing, leave us a comment here on the blog and we’ll see what we can do.

Every year SGM Lifewords produces a suite of creative tools and resources for Christmas, from booklets to PowerPoint presentations, printable posters and invites, through to service outlines and prayer stations.

As we work on this year’s materials, what would you like to see? What would be most useful to you in communicating the Christmas story to your community?

We can’t promise to deliver a complete wishlist, but your feedback will be really helpful as we select and prioritize from the many, many things we could do!

Just leave a comment below to let us know what you’d like to see. If you want to get a headstart, all the 2007 resources are still online here.

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.

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.

Here’s a nice idea from an Australian alternative worship group that would work well in a home group or smaller Easter event - a meal with ‘planted storytellers’.

Stories include Peter, Thomas, Judas, and Mary Magdelene, and it would make for a thought provoking evening of changing perspectives and human drama.

I know this is the Christmas blog, but just in case you happen across it in March, I wouldn’t want you to miss out on our Easter resources. SGM Lifewords’ Easter site for 2008 is now live, with audio, video, and spoken word downloads.

We’re also hosting an online reflective journey through Holy Week. You can sign up by email, and on day one we’ll send you a link to the day’s animation.

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the crowds poured out of the city to meet him. They tore down palm branches and waved them like flags. In extravagant worship they took their cloaks and threw them down before Jesus.

This Easter, will you lay down your cloak?

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.