St. Augustine's church Family services This page describes the services, and leads to those we have offered in the past. Forthcoming family services are ( well, should be ) listed here; and here's a bit about their history.

( The sketch was drawn by an artistically inclined helper probably somewhere around 2000; the apostrophe was inserted later by our resident pedant. )

Family Services are less formal than our usual Sunday morning services, and particularly designed to be attractive to children. We normally offer a Family Service on the first Sunday of each month, March to November, and occasionally at other times ( notably Easter and Christmas, when we offer both a carol service and a Christingle service ) if it seems like a good idea.

Before 2009, all our family services were stand-alone services without Holy Communion. During that period, the only regular St. Augustine's service was a Communion service at 8.00 a.m., and we held the Family Services at 10.00 a.m., so these services could be rather longer than those we offer now, with much more scope for telling a longer or more detailed story. Since the beginning of 2009, some of the services have been followed by Holy Communion, and some have been combined with other material, according to the whim of the currently presiding priest. Also, some of these services have been wholly or partly put together by people not primarily associated with St. Augustine's, so we don't always have all the details, so we've had to leave them out.

You are welcome to use these Family Services in your church if you wish to do so, in whole or in part. We have tried to ensure that, except where otherwise indicated, the material is original to St. Augustine's ( in which case we waive copyright ) or freely available for public use. In most cases, full scripts for the services are given, though for a few of the earlier services some details had been lost before we wrote the web pages and we have reconstructed what we could from memory. There are also copies ( as PDF files ) of the service sheets used by the congregation, and notes on details of the production. Notes for the individual services are listed in table below; general notes applicable to all the services are presented below the table. We have tried to make these reasonably complete, but if you have any questions about them please do not hesitate to ask.

So far as we know, there is nothing in the services which is likely to give offence in a Christian context. You should nevertheless convince yourself that the material can properly be presented; clearly, we cannot take any responsibility for your presentation of the material.

LIST OF SERVICES.

GENERAL NOTES FOR THE SERVICES.

( These are mostly Jean's notes. As Jean produces all the Family Services, they can be taken as authoritative. )

( For references to the internal geography of the church, it might be helpful to inspect the plan. )

1. While many rehearsals would be ideal, my original custom was to have two; typically, not every one is able to attend both rehearsals, but everyone can get to one of them. Also, I found that the first rehearsal revealed all manner of glitches and also gave people an opportunity to suggest minor improvements, and gave some idea of the length of the service. After some years, we reduced that to one full rehearsal, with informal rehearsals for any who couldn't attend.

2. Each person involved in the service is given a full service print-out with their part high-lighted and all stage directions included.

3. We sometimes swap the leadership role at natural breaks in the service ( for example, here ). This gives an opportunity for people to experience being leaders.

4. There is a highlighted "lectern" copy on the lectern ( reading desk ), usually in a bigger font than the individual scripts. ( After the first few services, which were fairly experimental in many ways, we found it best to move the lectern itself from its usual position on the hospital side to the organ side. This groups all the "administration" - organ, leader, projector - together, and simplifies the movement in the performance parts; see below for more detail. More recently, we have tended to change back again. This is not always clearly stated in the text, but as you will have to adapt everything to your local geography perhaps that's not very important. )

5. The whole service is displayed on the overhead projector, apart from stage directions and personal items such as testimonies and stories ( which are necessarily unscripted ). We do this because -

   • people with young children can glance up and see where we are in the service;

   • our actors are amateurs and some do not project their voices very well - so what they are saying can be read if necessary from the overhead;

   • On occasions when we invite the congregation to join in ( typically taking the part of "the crowd" ) it's useful to have the script easily accessible without reference to the service sheet ( though we generally include it in the sheet as well ).

   We found it helpful to display in red any parts which we wanted everyone to join in; if the context permits, we also label them "ALL :", or something similar. Our original projector was of the common sort using transparencies; later we acquired a video projector, and have since used that, driven from a computer.

6. Anyone who wants to take part is welcome - I make a point of finding something for them to do.

7. I assemble the whole service into one computer file and use this file to create the lectern copy, the overheads, the order of service etc.

8. We like to produce an order of service which has some of the important or challenging parts of the service on it. This is what people can take home, and we hope that God will use these service sheets to speak His message to the people.

9. We aim to complete the service in 45 minutes and usually manage to keep it under an hour.

10. In the first few years, we dressed up only for our Christmas services, because we didn't have time for dressmaking during the rest of the year. As time has gone by, we have acquired a few simple sack-like coloured robes and striped middle-eastish headdresses, white garments and wings for angels, etc., which we use when convenient.

11. Generally, we try to keep properties as simple as possible, but again we've accumulated a small collection as time has gone by. Also, at Christmas we decorate the church.

12. For quite a long time, we included the words of all the songs in the service sheets and the screen displays. This was mainly because we didn't have a congregational hymn book which contained the words of all the songs we wanted to use - indeed, as we used a very wide variety of material, there was probably no such song book available. In 2009, we finally acquired a set of congregational song books ( "Complete Anglican hymns old and new )which covered the whole range we wanted well enough to suit our purpose, and, from October 2009, we used these books instead. The words of the songs are therefore omitted from the services here from that time onward.

Some more specific notes :