This morning we were packed out at church, which was just lovely, even though there were as many people missing as usual.  Some occasional visitors, some returners after a little break, some guests.

And it all felt quite joyful in a fairly gentle, evenly paced kind of a way.

I combined Advent 3 (John the Baptist) an Advent 4 (Mary) under the heading of 'world changers' and we did a little bit of compare and contrast between their lives and the celebrity culture that plagues our own time.  We pondered, necessarily briefly, what me meant by 'changing the world' and who we would identify as people who have changed our own experience of the world, as well as those who have the impacted the coyurse of human history.

An amazing response during the interactive bit - it had been good in previous weeks, but this week was a level up.

So, our wall now has four collage 'trees' on it...

Our Jesse tree, which has one week still to go in terms of symbols to add

Our patriarchs and adventurers tree

Our prophets and discoverers tree

Our world changers tree

And ready for next Sunday we will have our church Christmas tree twinkling in a corner, as the children lead us their wonderful retelling of the Christmas story.