Advent Overview

Goal

Bring your parish family together to celebrate the season of Advent and to build community in an intergenerational event. It's a wonderful opportunity to involve people who may not always participate in parish activities. Parishioners of all ages can make a valuable contribution to the parish catechetical mission by lending their talents and time to this event.

Overview

Advent is an exciting and busy season as the Church family prepares for the coming of Jesus Christ. Use the materials on this Web site to create an enjoyable and meaningful Advent event. You will need the free Adobe® Reader® to access many of these resources. If you do not have this free software for viewing and printing PDF (Portable Document Format) files, you may download it here.

The event index at the end of this page has links to printable online instructions for each part of the event. The program has three parts:

1. Presentation (5 to 10 minutes)
   The event begins with a short presentation on the four Sundays of Advent. This presentation explores the Gospel readings for each Sunday and is appropriate for use in liturgical years A, B, or C.
2. Prayer Service (15 to 20 minutes)
   This prayer service provides an opportunity for all participants to come together to celebrate the spirit of Advent in prayer and song.
3. Activity Centers (approximately 30 minutes each)
   There are four suggested Activity Centers. Participants can make an Advent wreath, get to know John the Baptist, make thank-you cards, and play a game of Advent Bingo. Develop your event using all of them or choose only those best suited to your gathering space, time, budget, and volunteer availability. Although each activity is designed to run approximately 30 minutes, you can adapt any of them to better fit the needs and timeline of your parish's event.

To make organizing your parish event easier, we have put together the following resources:

Preparation Timeline

Bulletin Announcement

Publicity Flier (Choose to download an editable Microsoft Word document or a printable PDF to fill in by hand.)

For more information and free resources, see the Loyola Press Advent section.

Resources to Download

The Event Index at the bottom of this page provides links to view instructions for each part of this event. These instruction pages provide access to all downloadable handouts, leader guides, and other documents needed. You can choose to download each resource individually; or, if you prefer, click the link below to download all presentation and handout materials at once to create a master packet. This is a large file and may take a few minutes to download, depending on your Internet connection speed.

To make organizing the handouts, leader guides, and other documents for this event easier, we have included a printable Index of Downloads. This document tells you which resources go with which part of the event, how many pages each is, and how many copies you will need.

Note: This document is included in the Master Packet download above.

Event Index: Click to view instructions for each part of the event.