An Illustrated Lent for Families

Many customers have been asking for details about An Illustrated Lent and I apologize for not getting that online for you sooner. It’s been a little crazy the past week as we’ve gotten off to a great start with our Lenten Coloring Poster pre-orders. Over the past week, we’ve received more than 236 orders! I can’t wait to see how all of you get creative with these posters and integrate them into your churches and families this Lenten season.

An Illustrated Lent is going to launch next Wednesday, January 27. Like we did for Advent, we are releasing two editions of An Illustrated Lent: a Church Edition and a Family Edition. Below I want to share with you what you can expect to find included in both of those editions.

A complete listing of our products for Lent is below – we hope they will help your community and family live into the season of Lent.

• Lenten Coloring Posters – Vector Files Only
• Lenten Coloring Posters – Physical Posters Only
• Lenten Coloring Posters – Physical Posters & Virtual Files
• Lenten Coloring Sheets – 8.5×11
• An Illustrated Lent: Church Edition
• An Illustrated Lent: Family Edition

An Illustrated Lent: Church Edition

Illustrated Children’s Moments: The core of the Church Edition is what Illustrated Ministry focused on back in the day (you know, because we’ve been around for so long): Illustrated Children’s Moments. For Lent, we’ll be including illustrations and leader guides for the five Sundays of Lent, for Palm Sunday and then for Easter as well. The Illustrated Children’s Moments will be based on the Gospel texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Lent.

These illustrations will come in a variety of different formats so that they are ready-to-print and use when you open them up. They also make really good bulletin covers as well as coloring sheets to print out for kids for during worship or Sunday School. An sample of the Illustrated Children’s Moment for the first Sunday of Lent can be seen below:

Worship Activity Sheets: For Advent, we released our first Worship Activity Sheets. These are additional tools and resources you can use during Lent and Holy Week. They will include a variety of activities on them, including Complete-the-drawings, Word Searches and more coloring opportunities. Also – if you used An Illustrated Advent last month, if you could take 1 minute to fill out this survey about the Worship Activity Sheets? It really is just 3 very short questions.

Lenten Poster: We know many of you have bulletin boards, classrooms and nurseries that need decorating – and we’re also aware that most people don’t have a lot of time for things like that. Well, maybe we can help you out a little bit. This Lenten Poster will include themes, characters and drawings from throughout the resource, and you can share it on your bulletin boards or classrooms to help remind people about An Illustrated Lent, especially if you’re going to be encouraging families to get involved, and perhaps sending the Family Edition out to them electronically.

An Illustrated Lent: Family Edition

Family Devotions: We heard some great feedback about our Family Devotions from An Illustrated Advent and so are glad to be able to include them in An Illustrated Lent. For An Illustrated Lent, the devotions are written by Rev. Erika Marksbury, senior pastor at the First Baptist Church of McMinnville, Oregon. There are devotions for 7 weeks, starting with the 1st Sunday of Lent.

We know how busy families are and so we wanted to provide you with a way to connect with the Lenten season, but do so in a way that could fit into your daily routines. Our devotions are meant to be done over a family dinner, or before bedtime. Each devotion is 1 page and includes a scripture, some questions (a few very accessible ones and some Going Deeper questions as well), a suggested activity/practice to focus on during the week, and a short prayer.

Each of the devotions has a theme word for the week – and these are based off the Narrative Lectionary readings for Lent, and connect with the Lenten Coloring Posters.

Weekly Refrigerator Sign: Also included are weekly signs that correspond to that week’s devotions. On the sign will be a space for the family to write in what they decide to try and work on during the week, based on the activity/practice from the week’s devotion. Then the sign can be placed somewhere visible in the home, so everyone remembers what they are working on.

Lenten Coloring Sheets: Because the devotions connect with our Lenten Coloring Posters, we thought it would make sense to provide you with a smaller version of those coloring sheets, which you can use together with the devotions. These are meant to be printed out at 8.5×11 size and your kids will have fun coloring a different sheet each week.

You can also hang them up and watch the design come together over the course of Lent.. If you want something larger, or just want more flexibility, you can also always purchase the vector files here.

One More Thing

While the Lenten Coloring Posters are included in the Family Edition (in the 8.5×11 size) – we are going to be selling those a la carte as well starting January 27. We know not everyone may want or need to buy the Family Edition, so we wanted those smaller versions to be available to everyone.