If you’re looking for assistance in creating liturgies, writing prayers, putting together an order of service or reflections with children here are some great resources to help you in your job.
Top 5
- Spill The Beans is a beautifully designed and prepared resource for people interested in developing all-age worship within their congregation. Spill The Beans includes prayers, litanies, liturgies, discussion points, reflections, stories and more. Issue 2 and Issue 37 cover the current lectionary cycle.
- Laughing Bird a gift to the wider Church from the South Yarra Community Baptist Church in Melbourne, Australia. Laughing Bird is a lectionary based resource with Australian paraphrases of scripture, liturgy and prayers.
- The Billabong is a beautiful, simple blog by Jeff Shrowder, a retired minister within the UCA in Victoria. The Billabong hosts a collection of poetry, prayer, responsive liturgies and Psalms for use within the context of worship.
- Textweek.com has been operating for many years now and is one of the most helpful resources around. Textweek collates sermons, liturgies, prayers, articles, children reflections, images, videos… The website is in a state of flux at the moment due to the curator’s personal life but it is still one of the most helpful resources out there.
- The Church of Scotland’s Weekly Worship material is an awesome resource of themes, prayers, sermon ideas and more (it also occasionally includes work from Spill The Beans mentioned above). Be aware their seasons don’t sync with ours, so when its spring and they’re giving thanks for flowers we’ll be getting cold here. Still, it’s a great resource.
The Rest:
- The Assembly’s Worship Working Group has compiled new resources and guidelines to be used by Uniting Church congregations and Presbyteries. They are available online here: New Worship Resources 2018
- Lectionary Liturgies is a fantastic site where the author, Thom Shuman shares his lectionary based liturgies for people to use within their worship context. Thom also runs another site, Prayers4Today that shares prayers for use in personal and corporate worship.
- Liturgies Online is Moira Laidlaw’s website and hosts a large collection of lectionary-themed liturgies (including prayers and hymn suggestions) for use by worship leaders and preachers. Moira is based within the UCA in Queensland
- Sacredise is a great source of shared liturgical material, prayers, reflections, sermons and song ideas for progressive congregations. Well worth checking out when you’re curating worship.
- Ten Minutes on a Tuesday is a collection of resources developed for worship leaders and preachers by the Methodist Church of New Zealand. It is given in Word format to allow you to edit and rework the material for your own context and worship style.
- Liturgy Link is a shared resource, a community of people providing prayers, ideas, sermon thoughts and more for people following the Revised Common Lectionary.
- Mustard Seeds is a collection of lectionary based resources and reflections for people leading worship and/or preaching written by Rev Ann Scull from the UCA in Victoria. On Mustard Seeds you’ll find ideas for children’s talks, themes, activities to run, liturgies for use, videos to use, stories to tell, images for use and book resources to assist with the worship leader each week.
- David Beckswith’s liturgy and worship website has a large collection of sermon, hymn suggestions and liturgy ideas all sorted into the 3 year lectionary cycle for use by worship leaders and preachers. David’s based within the UCA in Melbourne.
