What Can’t Wait?
Creative Resources for Advent (Year A)
Advent is a season of waiting, but is idle waiting what God wants of us? In preparation for the coming Messiah, we wonder together—what things can’t wait? What demands our immediate attention? What requires our work and preparation? What is it that God can’t wait for? Is it our praise, reconciliation, and proclamation? Is it the end of suffering, isolation, and fear? This Advent, we invite you to join us in imagining, prioritizing, and preparing. As we wait, what can’t?
This is a bundle of 9 multimedia resources for you to use in your worship and ministry this Advent & Christmas season. The What Can’t Wait? theme emerged for us in our group study of the Revised Common Lectionary texts for Advent & Christmas Eve (Year A). If you’d like to learn more about our theme and receive worship + programming ideas for fleshing it out in your context, be sure to download our FREE THEME INFOGRAPHIC HERE. We also include the theme infographic with every bundle purchase.
We bundle our resources because they often overlap in use, and because we want to equip you with comprehensive materials for a whole season. Each resource is also available separately. Scroll down & click the “Resource Details” buttons to learn more about each individual resource.
Note: All resources are digital files. Release date: 2019.
{We consider your purchase a form of patronage to support our work and ministry. To make our resources accessible to congregations of all sizes, we offer tiered pricing on our bundles. Please choose the bundle price you are able to give. Your support makes our ministry possible!}
$274 TOTAL BUNDLE VALUE (76 digital files)
WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE BUNDLE:
{All of the following resources are included in the bundle, but each resource is also available separately for individual purchase}
1.What Can’t Wait? Advent Devotional
[Individual Price: $18-$85]
We hope this devotional might awaken you to the ways God can’t wait to create hope, peace, joy, and love.
Beginning with December 1st, 2019, this daily devotional follows the Revised Common Lectionary for Advent Year A and invites you to read, reflect, pray, and color your way through the end of 2019. Each day in the devotional offers something new, including: poetic prayers, original visuals inspired by scripture, written reflections, prompts for visual meditation, prompts for journaling, colorable pages, and active prompts.
This is a great resource for older youth and adults, but parents could also invite children to help them color and embody the weekly active prompts.
[Individual Price: $15]
This collection of liturgies offers fresh words for worship for Advent through Christmas Eve (following the RCL, Year A). The download includes a Candle Lighting Liturgy, Call to Worship, and Prayer of Confession for each week in Advent and Christmas Eve. The liturgy is inspired by the RCL (Year A), the What Can’t Wait? theme, and the traditional weekly Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, and love.
We hope you will copy/paste or adapt these prayers for your corporate worship (with credit).
[Individual Price: $5]
Want a fun and meaningful way to journey through Advent together as a family? Need simple action prompts for your children to embody the Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, and love?
Print our Advent Action Calendar on 11x17 paper and hang it on your fridge. Starting on December 1st, count down the days of Advent by moving a magnet to mark each day. Then, complete the daily action prompt together as a family.
[Individual Price: $12]
Ever wish you had a better way to organize your thoughts around a worship series? Want help connecting the lectionary texts for Advent (Year A) with the theme, What Can’t Wait? We created this resource to help you bridge the gap.
Like biblical commentary, this guide offers you seeds of ideas, theme connections, questions for deeper study, and real-world intersections. For each text, we’ve included: suggestions for how to connect the scripture to the What Can’t Wait? theme, guiding questions for deeper study, quotes for inspiration, and links to articles and books that bring new perspectives.
Please note: We are intentional about including diverse voices, authors, speakers, and theologians in this guide to offer deeper insight into each scripture. This particular guide links to the work and scholarship of: Renita Weems, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Walter Brueggemann, Richard Rohr, Desmund Tutu, Barbara Brown Taylor, Brene Brown, Traci Blackmon, Martin Luther King, Jr., and more.
[Individual Price: $25]
This short film offers a reflection on the precarious timing of Christ’s birth. God chooses an unwed, lower-class, teenage girl forced to travel cross-country to be counted for the census in the midst of her third trimester. God’s plan to enter the world in human flesh seems so perilous—so much could and did go wrong. This led to the question, what if God had waited?
And yet, God couldn’t wait. God couldn’t wait to be love known in flesh and bone—and neither should we.
We invite you to show this film as a meditation during worship, or as part of a Sunday School, youth group, or campus ministry education event.
[Individual Price: $60]
This is a collection of 13 visuals inspired by RCL scripture texts for Advent (Year A). Download includes files formatted for print and web/projection, as well as artist statements for each visual, plus a visio divina bible study guide.
left: “A Dance” inspired by the Magnificat (by Hannah Garrity) | right: “One with Mystery” inspired by John the Baptist (by Lauren Wright Pittman)
[Individual Price: $7]
This collection of 6 poetic prayers explores the question, what can’t wait? Each poem reflects on how God can’t wait to create hope, peace, joy, and love. Honest and intimate, these poems offer Advent meditations that might become prayers of your own. We hope you might adapt them for worship liturgy, use them to open and close programming events, or print them as they are for members in your community to read and return to throughout the season of Advent.
Hope looks the 24-hour news cycle in the face,
Hope looks our broken relationships in the face,
Hope looks our low self-esteem in the face,
And declares at low tide that the water will return.
Hope is exhaling, trusting that your body will inhale again.
Hope is watching the sunset and setting an alarm.
Hope is planting seeds in the winter, assuming summer will come.
—Sarah Are, from “God’s Promised Day Can’t Wait (Hope Can’t Wait)”
[Individual Price: $20]
This Advent, project & trace these designs to create painted or paper lace banners for your sanctuary. These designs by Hannah Garrity feature traditional Advent & Christmas imagery as well as imagery from the Isaiah passages in the RCL for Advent, Year A. Look closely in this composition for: plowshares and pruning hooks, the wolf and the lamb, crocuses blooming in the desert, the stump of Jesse, the wise men, the shepherds, the angels above, and Mary, Joseph, and Jesus in the inn.
We hope these designs (and our instructional materials) can simply be a starting point for you to create art and beauty that is uniquely your own. Gather a group and create together, for the creative process is just as meaningful as the final result. And we promise, these are not as hard to create as they may look!
[Individual Price: $45]
Whether you are a church with a full-time communications staff or one whose pastor handles all communications (on top of everything else), this branding bundle provides everything you need to effectively share the theme, What Can’t Wait?, with your community. Download includes files for print and web so you can use them for projecting images and slides in worship, printing on bulletins, study materials, church publications, and advertising your worship on your website and online.
We encourage you to use these branding materials to share the What Can’t Wait? theme throughout Advent and Christmas.