{"id":1298,"date":"2019-03-27T13:34:44","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T19:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2019-03-27T13:44:35","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T19:44:35","slug":"good-friday-for-children-exploring-all-three-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/1298\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Friday for Children: Exploring All Three Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Today\u2019s post is by Virginia Cover, Senior Pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Have you ever noticed that attendance of families with young children tends to be sparse on Good Friday? As a pastor, I have certainly noticed this, especially in our congregation where these same families readily attend worship. I have a few guesses for this absence. For starters, the Three Days has only recently been recovered and has not been talked about frequently where I serve. But there was more. I asked a few young parents why they stayed away from Good Friday in particular. They told me about services with loud crashing sounds, extended periods of silence (at 7:30p.m. with an over-tired child), and detailed and gory depictions of the crucifixion. One of them told me how they tried to read the story of Jesus\u2019 death from the <em>children\u2019s <\/em>bible to their young son and he wouldn\u2019t let Dad finish. He physically retreated from the book\u2014the book he normally longs to read from. No parent wants nightmare-central on Easter weekend, and no worshipping community avoids confronting death either. What to do?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1299 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Spark-Story_Day-Jesus-Died-300x195.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Spark-Story_Day-Jesus-Died-300x195.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Spark-Story_Day-Jesus-Died-768x500.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Spark-Story_Day-Jesus-Died-1024x666.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Spark-Story_Day-Jesus-Died-250x163.jpg 250w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Spark-Story_Day-Jesus-Died-538x350.jpg 538w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As a parent of two young children myself, I began to consider a Good Friday service especially for kids. Another congregation in town was doing a \u201cfootsteps of Jesus\u201d kid-friendly event on Good Friday, so why couldn\u2019t we? But the more I planned a Good Friday for kids, the more I rediscovered that nothing is as powerful as the church\u2019s own ancient way of enacting the Three Days: washing feet, eating the meal, stripping the altar, adoring the cross, praying for others, lighting a fire, inscribing a candle, sprinkling water, singing psalms, reading from scripture.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s power in the Three Days when we <em>hold them together<\/em>. Children cannot hold the empty tomb in their minds while singing \u201chow pale thou art in anguish\/in sore abuse and scorn\u201d in complete darkness. The adults weren\u2019t holding it together either because the Three Days were so new, and they didn\u2019t yet realize that missing one service meant leaving a hole in the story fabric.<\/p>\n<p>We now have a service every year on Good Friday designed especially for children, yet it involves adults, too, and holds the Three Days together. We lay out a \u201chighway\u201d story map with items representing the high points of the church\u2019s liturgy around the Three Days, telling the biblical story and the liturgical story together as we place each piece on the roadway. Then we spend some time floating through stations that go deeper into each day\u2019s elements: a play dough mat connects the Last Supper to other special meals, a Good Friday sad touch and feel table (nails, rough hewn cross, crown of thorns) with a reflection sheet and coloring page of the <em>Inside Out<\/em>(Pixar, 2015) character Sad, an art project that when finished reveals a surprise (like the women discovered when they came to the tomb), and so on. One station is dedicated to putting the story in sequence to take home and tell again, either in the form of \u201cstory eggs\u201d or watercolor paintings. We close with a taste of Easter in song, scripture and food\u2014we eat \u201cresurrection rolls\u201d put together earlier at one of the stations\u2014a sweet, Alleluia ending to our Three Day exploration. You can read <a href=\"https:\/\/virginiacover.wordpress.com\/2016\/03\/30\/good-friday-a-child-friendly-exploration-of-the-three-days\/\">more about the service here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>What I have loved the most about this experience is how the children teach us the important things. To date, the most popular stations are not play dough or art projects but the <em>foot washing.\u00a0<\/em>The children know what to do by heart: hold the heel, pour the water, wipe the feet\u2014and they wash and are washed with eagerness and joy every year.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-1301 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Footwashing-Pankakes-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Footwashing-Pankakes-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Footwashing-Pankakes-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Footwashing-Pankakes-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Footwashing-Pankakes-250x188.jpg 250w, https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/60\/2019\/03\/Footwashing-Pankakes-467x350.jpg 467w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This Maundy Thursday our congregation will be getting out the tubs and towels for the first time together in our main sanctuary. Someone asked if I was nervous about how it would go, since we have never had foot washing in the service before. \u201cNope!\u201d I replied, \u201cBecause the children know what to do. They can teach us!\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Photo above\u00a0from the Spark Story Bible (Augsburg Fortress: Minneapolis, 2009), 476-477. Illustrations by Peter Grosshauser and Ed Temple<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today\u2019s post is by Virginia Cover, Senior Pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Have you ever noticed that attendance of families with young children tends to be sparse on Good Friday? As a pastor, I have certainly noticed this, especially in our congregation where these same families readily attend worship. I have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":241,"featured_media":1301,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Good Friday for Children: Exploring All Three Days - ELCA Worship<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worship\/1298\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Good Friday for Children: Exploring All Three Days - ELCA Worship\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today\u2019s post is by Virginia Cover, Senior Pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. 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