Article from Cross Keys magazine, Winter 2006
Remembrance Eucharist is a hit with teenage worshippers
If you thought a two hour service of Holy Communion for Remembrance would go down like a lead balloon with 11-18 year olds, you couldn’t be more wrong. Over a hundred young people came to Critical Mass at All Saints Wellingborough on 10 November and took a very different view.
“It was lush … wicked!”
“I really liked the lasers … and the way they did the communion”.
“My favourite bit was when we did the writing.”
“I liked seeing people from other churches”.
“I liked the bit about peace”.
These were just some of the comments they made over pizza at the end of the evening.
During the service the young people from churches in and around Wellingborough had watched wartime film footage, seen what they’d written on a blackboard cross wiped clean during the Confession, tied white ribbons onto black mesh to represent their prayers during the Intercessions, and silently exchanged the Peace.
They also took turns to write onto two huge bits of paper their thanks for a sacrifice someone had made, and a message to the future. They heard the story of of L/Cpl Johnson Beharry, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in Iraq.
The service was planned with Diocesan Youth Officer, Paul Niemiec, and Mission Enabler, Tim Sledge. As a teenage veteran of service planning for her own youth group put it, “either Tim Sledge and that lot are very young or they just think like us!”
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