Are there any good resources for teaching youth about worship? I teach a group of kids from 7th -12th grade, but they are a fairly advanced group with whom I sometimes use material aimed at adults.
Specifically, I am wondering about resources with basic theology on how and why we worship (a little history, and then perhaps working together on designing various parts of a service).
The goal is to engage both the kids who are more theological and intellectual in focus (the majority of this group), and those who just want to worship together. Any suggestions?
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Hi Chuck! We are studying worship in our HS catechism class. We started off by watching the documentary Spirit and Truth and discussing it along the way--I highly recommend this! Now we are looking at each of the components of typical reformed worship services and next we will be planning and leading an entire morning service. There used to be a pretty decent Faith Alive Resource called Sunday Morning Live, but they have stopped printing them. There is also a really great chapter on worship in a URC catechism curriculum called "Facing Faith's Challenges".
The middle school level of the DWELL curriculum has a unit on worship during which the group plans their own worship service. It's year 3, unit 1 of the Dive level of DWELL. CRC churches can access the leader materials for free on DWELL Digital if you'd like to look at it to see if it would work. You can also preview the leader guide and accompanying DIVE magazine on the Digital Library. You might need to adapt it a bit for it to work with the older kids, but since you can view it for free, it might be worth looking to see if there are parts of it that would work for your group.
Here's a link to the first session of the unit on DWELL Digital (you'll need to log-in to view the whole session, but can preview it without a login). And a link to the leader guide and student resource on the Digital Library.
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