All Saints Day

People are always curious about who we are, and where we come from. In Maori culture, knowing and understanding your whakapapa (your place in your geneology) has been an important part of identity. All Saints day is a day in the Christian calendar that reminds us of some important Christian brothers and sisters whose lives have been acclaimed by others over the years. We remember the fathers of the faith, the prophets, Mary and Jospeh, the apostles and so many other biblical saints. We also commemorate the saints of the Christian Church including martyrs like Perpetua, teachers like Augustine, and mystics like St. Teresa of Avila.

Later, All Souls Day was added to the church calendar on November 2nd, as a way to acknowledge all believers in the church who have died, and it provides a time to give thanks to God for those men and women of faith in our lives. 

Chalk Windows

If you have any clear windows in your church, you can use liquid chalk markers to write on them.  Invite people to write the names of those who are the saints of your community, or whose lives exemplify the beatitudes.  It can be a way to surround ourselves with the cloud of witnesses.  (These will wipe off very easily with a damp cloth).

Remembering

If part of your tradition is to remember those who have died during the year on All Saints/All Souls you could:

• invite people to light a candle, perhaps to honour the light of faith that shone in them if your congregation isn’t so comfortable with the practice of lighting candles as prayer.  Votive candles or tealights can be placed in containers of sand on a table.  Large baking dishes can work.  For a free-standing option, try a sand-filled bird bath or large planter (once full of sand these can be very heavy – consider using a light space filler - like polystyrene, but kinder for the environment!) to fill two thirds of the planter before adding sand).
• provide people with small cards to write (or draw for prereaders) names of those they wish to remember.  Gather them in baskets, in a similar way to the offertory, and pray a prayer of remembrance and thanksgiving over them.

The courage to live eternally

“If Easter is when Christianity celebrates the resurrection of Christ, All Saints’ is when Christianity celebrates the resurrection of the rest of us. The focus of Easter is the victory of Jesus over death and the grave. The focus of All Saints’ is resurrection and life eternal for the rest of us.
I think it can be an act of courage to believe in eternal life and to strive to live lives consistent with this belief. It takes courage to live as though our lives matter eternally — even if they seem to us very ordinary, even frustrating and disappointing. It takes courage to believe that our lives matter beyond this lifetime, or even the earthly memory of it, when so much of what we do seems trivial and even pointless. It takes courage to choose to do the good and just thing in terms of eternity, rather than what is easiest, even when it will cost us something in the short-term and nobody will much notice or care anyway”
Reverend Dean Snyder.  
Read the rest here

All Saints resources

This video from Evangelisation Brisbane (Catholic Church) has some ideas - bunting, litany - that could be included or modified to mark All Saints Days

Gospel Conversations

All Saints' Day! One of the great feasts of the Church. We hear Jesus in Luke's Gospel describing what the "blessed" ones are in God's Kingdom, and it's not what anyone hearing it for the first time would ever have expected! Join Alec, Jenny and Lisa as they overcome some technical glitches (you'll notice that our team magically rearrange themselves at one point on the screen) to talk over with Michael some life-changing ideas.

Easter and All Saints

If you had special decorations, like an Alleluia banner, in your church for Easter, today is a great day to bring them back out.  Drawing on the Rev. Dean Snyder’s perspective, if Easter celebrates Christ’s resurrection, then All Saints is when we celebrate the resurrection of the rest of us. 
For more info, see here

Godly play

Why not try this Godly Play inspired YouTube clip for All Saints' Day? One of many such clips from the St Albans Diocese (UK) based on the Revised Common Lecfionary. You could always use this for inspiration and create your own NZ version.