Sunday Immersed Event and Kids

For All Saints' Day we're including an Immersed element to worship on Sunday night: "From Stained Glass to Vibrant Living." See the website! The website description is a much more concise description of an Immersed event than what you'll find here. Skip to the middle of this post if you want to know how our Immersed event this Sunday affects parents and children. Skip to the end here if you want a St. Francis bibliography for children! I'll try to put together one for the other saints later this week.

If you're wondering what an Immersed event is at Artisan it's an opportunity to worship the Living God a little differently. Alot of Sunday worship is a corporate expression in the sense that everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. You start singing together, you stop singing together. You pray together. You take communion together. You listen to the message together. You bring your offerings together. You leave together. It's individual in that we're all individuals in terms of how it affects us or how we respond to God but we're all doing the same thing together at the same time.

For us, an Immersed event has been a night set aside during a holiday season. For one of their Immersed events before our merge, Capax Dei created a Labyrinth. Usually, there's comforting quieting background music, subdued lighting, and a series of stations that the participants move through individually at their own pace. People can come and go, start and stop whenever they want to. There's usually something to read, a way to respond, the creators of the stations try to draw on as many senses as they can to enrich the experience. It's a very personal time, yet a shared experience. This week it will be part of our Sunday worship. In times past it's happened on a separate evening so you could come and go, commune with God for whatever length of time you want to and not have to talk with anyone if you don't want to.

If the night is set apart for an Immersed event, parents can come alone or bring their children. This Sunday, because it's part of our regular worship, we'll offer a place and people to care for restless toddlers while their parents are going through the stations, but children 3 and older can easily participate with their parents or guardians, respond to the visuals, respond to questions, pray and experience the sensory experiences that are available to deepen their knowledge and worship of God.

I have St. Francis. Here's a list of some beautifully illustrated library books for children, if you're interested.

Hodges, Margaret. Brother Francis and the Friendly Beasts. Charles Scribner's Sons: NY, 1991. Beautiful soft realistic watercolors by Ted Lewin. (at least my daughter tells me they're watercolors.)

Mayo,Margaret. Bother Sun, Sister Moon: The Life and Stories of St. Francis. Little , Brown and Company: New York, 2000. The book of short stories doesn't have as many pictures but they're nicely done: medieval style, gentle and childlike.

Visconti, Guido. Clare and Francis. Eerdmans Books for Young Readers; Grand Rapids, MI 2003. Beautiful gold gilt illustrations; medieval iconic feel by Bimba Landmann.

Wildsmith, Brian. Saint Francis. Wm. B Eerdman's Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI 1996. Vibrant colors, metallic feel, lots of detail, more oriental feel.