What does the Lord require of you?

All-age worship again this morning at Wesley Hall, and this month we focused on Micah & Matthew.

Neil talking about the Beatitudes

The theme for our time together came from Micah 6:8 - "What does the Lord require of you?" We set the scene by focusing first on worship, singing 'Blessed be the name of the Lord', with everyone (more or less) joining in with the actions during the chorus.

Then the kids helped out by assembling a jigsaw of the Beatitudes from Matthew 5:3-12 (you can possibly just make it out on the GoPak table to the right of the picture).

We then read the Beatitudes together, before Liz led us in a short quiz, which took us to the first part of the answer to the question posed at the start of the service, looking at characters from films and cartoons and asking the question 'Are they acting justly?' Some were easy (Lady Macbeth, the Grinch); others not quite so easy (Severus Snape, Fantastic Mr Fox, Robin Hood), and this helped us to think about what it means to 'act justly'.

Liz's quiz in full flow

We then sang 'Blessed be your name', before exploring the next part of the answer: 'to Love Mercy'. Not an easy concept to explain at the best of times, but we tried to do it using selected clips from Disney's 'Beauty & the Beast', through which Neil lead us into looking at how the Beast was changed and learnt the power of mercy and love which eventually brought about his transformation.

After another song ('Brother, sister, let me serve you') we spent some time in prayer. As a focus for our prayers we turned to the third part of the answer to our original question: 'Walking humbly with our God.' Everyone had been given, as they came into church, a pair of paper feet, and we used these to focus on people or situations where there was a need to walk humbly, or where people's walks were hard and problematic. We were invited to write these situations on the feet, to keep one with us for when we went home, and to bring the other one and lay it out at the front of the church so that they were all leading to the Cross. We rounded the prayers off with the Lord's Prayer together before our final hymn - "We are marching in the light of God".

Sue draws everything together at the end

The final act was Sue reading again the Beatitudes in a modern version (from Roots magazine), before drinks and biscuits were consumed.