Monday, March 8, 2010

Angel of Faith

In Danish churches it is tradition that children take confirmation classes when they're either in 7th or 8th grade. So also at my church, and this weekend was their bi-annual overnight stay in church (something Morten likes to do with them - they always tend to think it's great fun). Morten had planned a happening/role-play were the kids were to find and wake up the Angel of Faith, the Angel of Hope and the Angel of Love and do certain activities together with them. He'd asked me to be the Angel of Faith, and I'd happily agreed as I thought it sounded like a great laugh.

And so it was :) Our deacon had gotten hold of some delightful wings and halos, and we'd arranged to be dressed similarly - jeans, and then a blue blouse for the Angel of Faith, a green one for the Angel of Hope and (of course) a red one for the Angel of Love. I promise you, we were a sight for sore eyes! I'll be sure to post photos as soon as I get my hands on them ;-)

Saturday
I was to hide in the crawlspace of the church, and when the kids found me, they had to say/sing the Apostle Creed to wake me up. That didn't wake me up completely though, so I sent them to the church room where the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of the Jesus Creed (Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these. Mark 12, 29b-31) had been hidden. Once they found them and completed the puzzle they had to learn it off by heart, and say it to me. I then had them sit around the alter while I told them of Paul's conversion and the events that lead to him writing 1st Corinthians 13. I was a bit worried about that part of it, as I wasn't sure I could hold their attention, but thankfully it went really, really well and I managed to round off before people started fidgeting too much ;) And I loved telling it. It's a story I know well, but one that new Christians don't always know well, so I didn't feel like I was just wasting their time. Afterwards Morten told me that he'd occasionally thought, "If I were to tell the story, I'd now say abc... hey! She said abc too!" Teehee! Like uncle like niece I guess? ;)

We then sent the kids downstairs to find their New Testaments, split up in groups, and skim through four chapters (John 3, Romans 10, Hebrews 11 and James 1) and find the verse that spoke most strongly to them about what it means to have faith. I loved one group in particular. They'd picked Romans 10:4 (Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.), but when I came to ask them about it, one of them admitted that she didn't really know what it meant, so I got to explain it to them :)

I disappeared shortly after that, promising to return the following day for church.

Sunday
Before the service started, us three angels met in the deacon's office to get dressed without anybody in the congregation seeing our wings and halos. We hid out during the sounding of the bells, and when the organist started playing the voluntary prior to the service, the doors opened wide, and we strode in to walk through the church and sit up by the alter. Small titter started as soon as we entered, and roared into full-blown laughter by the time everybody could see all of us. Priceless! For most of the service we just sat there, but instead of a sermon we'd invited "Zacchaeus the Tax Collector" (of Luke 19) who was then interviewed by the three angels as well as anybody from the congregation who cared/dared to come up and ask a couple of questions. We should probably have prepared more questions on beforehand, but for an impro, it worked quite well.

Definitely one of the weirder things I've ever done in church - and as somebody attending Haraldskirken, that's saying something! I loved every minute of it though :-)

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