Everything in here has a job, and every job lines up with a part of the service. Follow the path down the page. Tap any stop to find out what's happening and what to reach for.
Worship bags are available at each entrance to the sanctuary. Take one, use it, and leave it at the door on your way out. (We would like them back. Gently.)
WorshipFollow along with the service.
You don't have to use every item every week. One is plenty. The point isn't to keep a child busy through the service. It's to give them a way into it.
CreateMake something about what you notice.
Use it any time during the service. The only prompt is to make something connected to worship today: a word that stuck, a person being prayed for, what the story looked like in your head, the shape of the music. Nothing needs to be finished, recognizable, or shown to anyone.
re:createGive your hands something to do.
Busy hands very often make for better listening. The one rule is that it has to be quiet. If it clicks, pops, or rattles, it goes back in the bag until after the service.
Tap a stop
- Movement
The Gathering of God's People
In the name of Christ we answer God's call and assemble as the community of faith.
- Movement
The Proclamation of God's Word
We listen for God in the words that have been read and sung and told in this room for a very long time.
- Movement
The Response of God's People
Having heard, we answer, with song, with prayer, with what we have.
- Movement
The Sending of God's People
We are blessed, and then we are sent. Worship doesn't end so much as it changes address.
The icons in your bulletin
These are the same icons printed in your bulletin. When you spot one on the page, it tells you where we are in the service, and what to reach for in the bag. Tap any one for what it actually means.
Quotations are from the Book of Common Worship, "The Service for the Lord's Day: A Description of Its Movement and Elements," pp. 34 to 44. Special Time with Young Disciples is FPC's own practice and is not named there.
Create
Make something about what you notice today.
For kids
Here's the only instruction: make something about worship today.
A word you heard and liked. Something you're thankful for. The person you're praying for. A shape the music made you think of. What you think the story looked like. There is no wrong thing to make, and it doesn't have to look like anything to anyone but you.
For grown-ups
What they produce doesn't need to be legible, literal, or finished to count. A gray lump that they tell you is "the loud part of the song" is a child who was listening closely to the loud part of the song. Ask what it is before you guess.
The materials rotate week to week, so there's always something a little new without anything new to buy.
re:create
Something for your hands, so the rest of you can listen.
For kids
Sitting still is hard work. Grown-ups don't always remember that. This makes it easier, and using it doesn't mean you've stopped paying attention. Lots of people listen better when their hands are busy.
One rule: quiet hands, quiet toy. If it makes noise, it goes back in the bag until after. (You will know. Everyone will know.)
Why a toy belongs in church
The name is a small joke that turns out to be serious. Recreation and re-creation are the same word, and Sunday is when we claim both.
Rest is not what's left over after the work. It's built into the week at the beginning. God rests on the seventh day and calls that rest holy, not idle. Sabbath isn't the absence of activity; it's delight given a place on the calendar.
And play shows up in Scripture in stranger places than we tend to remember. In Proverbs, Wisdom is at God's side during creation itself, rejoicing before God always, playing in God's inhabited world. Play is present at the making of everything. When Zechariah pictures a city finally healed, the image isn't a courtroom or a treasury. It's streets full of children playing in them. That's the picture of a world set right.
Children already know this. They discover by handling: turning a thing over, testing what it does, finding the edges. That is a real way of knowing, not a lesser one, and it doesn't switch off when they walk into a sanctuary.
So a fidget in a worship bag isn't a bribe for good behavior, and it isn't a distraction we tolerate. It's an honest acknowledgment that God made bodies along with souls, that attention lives in the hands as much as the head, and that a child discovering something with their fingers during the sermon is doing something a great deal like worship.
For grown-ups
The fidget rotates, so there's something slightly new most weeks. The only rule worth enforcing is the noise rule.
Grown-Ups and Youth
Something to hold works at every age.
The bags are sized for children. The need they meet is not.
The deacons keep a basket, and everything in it is available to anyone in the sanctuary, at any age, without having to ask twice.
If you're a teenager or a young adult
Sitting still and quiet for an hour is a hard thing to ask of a body, and we ask it every week. If earbuds make the organ bearable, take the earbuds. If your hands need something to do so the rest of you can listen, take the fidget. Using one isn't the same as checking out. For a lot of people it's the only way to check in.
(You can also step out and come back. That has always been allowed. It seems worth saying out loud.)
What's in the basket
Everything in here is quiet, and everything in here was chosen because it doesn't look like a children's toy. That second part matters more than it probably should.
- Noise cancelling earbudsThey take the edge off the organ, the brass, and the general volume of a full sanctuary without shutting the service out. Everything else in this basket gets passed around. These don't. A pair belongs to one person, so once you've opened yours it's yours, and it goes home with you.
- A roller for your palmA weighted barrel with two rollers that turn silently against each other inside it. It sits in one hand and moves under your thumb. Heavy enough to feel like a real object rather than a toy, which for a lot of people is the difference between using one and not.
- Silicone coated magnetsTextured spheres, a little over an inch across, that pull toward each other and push apart. The silicone coating is the whole point: no click, no clack, no buzz. You can work them one-handed in your lap through an entire sermon and the person beside you won't know.
- A ring that spinsWorn on a finger and spun with a thumb. Silent, one-handed, and close to invisible from two feet away. Several ring sizes come with it, so it fits whoever picks it up.
- A gel ball that always comes backPalm sized and soft enough to flatten completely between both hands. It returns to a sphere every time, slowly, and the slowness is the satisfying part. Nothing to click and nothing to drop.
- Focus putty in a tinSilicone putty, soft and slow moving, in a small case that screws shut. Squeeze it, stretch it, fold it back into itself, put it away. It doesn't melt or go stiff the way the putty you remember from childhood did.
- A cube that folds into itselfEight small cubes hinged together so they fold in on themselves and never quite run out of moves. One handed, endlessly repeatable, and easy to work without looking down at it.
- Sticker sets, with tweezersSmall illustrated scenes and sheets of stickers, placed one at a time with a pair of precision tweezers. Far more absorbing than it sounds. It's the same idea as the making material in the children's bags, for anyone who would rather not be handed crayons.
A few notes for the deacons. The magnet sets stay in this basket and out of the children's bags, because strong magnets and small children are a bad combination. The putty stays in its tin unless there's a hard surface to work on, because it can stain fabric and upholstery, which describes most of what people are wearing and sitting on. The folding cube gets tested against the noise rule before it goes in the basket, since hinged plastic can clack, and the rule applies to grown-ups too. And the earbuds are the only single-user item in here. Children are offered over-ear headphones instead.
For grown-ups
Sensory and attentional differences don't resolve at confirmation. Autistic teenagers, adults with ADHD, people carrying anxiety, people who came in from a brutal week, people who process grief with their hands: all of them are in the pews on a given Sunday, and a good number of them have learned to white-knuckle it, because the alternative looked like admitting something in public.
The COAST Clinic at Bradley Hospital puts the mechanism about as plainly as it can be put: fidgets "provide an easy and accessible way to help self-regulate or concentrate by providing auditory, visual and/or tactile input," and they help most with anxiety, ADHD, and autism, which are the same conditions that affect sustained attention and sensory processing. They add one caveat worth carrying into a sanctuary. A fidget may not do both jobs at once. What settles a body is not automatically what sharpens it.
A basket held by a deacon changes that math. It moves the tool out of the category of things you have to request and into the category of things that are simply out, the way hymnals and pew Bibles are out. Nobody asks permission for a hymnal.
Quotation from "Fidget Toys: What Are They and How Can They Help Children and Adults?", the COAST Clinic at Bradley Hospital, Brown University Health, November 2023.
Why this belongs in the sanctuary
Worship has never been a disembodied activity. We stand, we sit, we kneel, we eat, we pass a plate, we shake hands with people we hardly know. The service assumes a body and then keeps giving it things to do.
What it doesn't always account for is that bodies differ, and that some of them need more help than a wooden pew provides in order to stay in the room at all. When Paul reaches for a picture of the church, he reaches for a body with many parts, and his point is that the parts are not interchangeable and none of them is optional. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you.
So meeting that need belongs nearer the center of worship than the edge of it. A welcome that runs out at the sanctuary door was not a welcome.
