“Pentecost Sunday is an end and a beginning. It is the culmination of the season of Easter. It is the day when the church senses the all-pervasive power of Easter as the Spirit is unleashed on Creation.”[1]

During the service people wrote on individual flames where they were hearing the Spirit call and what gifts they had been given to use in their calling. As part of the offering time they brought them forward to be assembled into the mural shown here.

• Fire pit on the sidewalk (must be attended)
• Remove the outside doors from their hinges (assuming this is safe and reversible)
• Make stackable boxes marked “everything we know about God” and give one to everyone entering along with instructions to take it up to the front of the church. Someone there assists people to stack them in the shape of a tower on top of several boxes that are already in place. These are rigged with string so when the account of the tower of Babel is read the strings can be pulled by a couple of people in the front rows to activate a spectacular collapse.
• Later in the service people can approach the rubble as Peter’s speech is being read and receive a cross sticker to place on a box (or a small wooden cross to place inside a box or just by itself) to take out with them. Alternatively, distribute the boxes before the sermon and have people add their own words and images of the empty tomb, tongues of fire, etc.
• Red rose petals – drop from balcony as people exit or in baskets in the pews, for handling during sermon
• Toss red, orange and yellow streamers over the congregation during or after the benediction.
• Sparklers to take away.
• The church, frankly, needs more parties. Roberto Goizueta reminds us that “Play, recreation, and celebration are the most authentic forms of life precisely because, when we are playing, recreating, or celebrating, we are immersed in, or ‘fused,’ with the action itself, and those other persons with whom we are participating. Thus, we are involved in and enjoying the living itself.”[2] We chartered as a church on Pentecost and we threw ourselves and the neighborhood a block party with games, food and live music. Even if you didn’t charter on that day, it’s still the birthday of the Church, so whoop it up. Maybe you’ll have an annual picnic that day and hire a band or fly kites or do something else beautiful that expresses your identity as a church and that can be enjoyed by all.

Feel free to post additional ideas below!

The worship band worked up a command performance of their favorite covers of the last year for our block party.

[1] Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 161-162.

[2] Roberto Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesus: Toward a Hispanic/ Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995), p. 94. Qtd. In William A. Dyrness, Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011), 55.