Children's Church: Living Waters at St John's has now accumulated a number of scripts for Christmas Nativity plays for children. Our Nativity plays are actually performed on Christmas morning, in the main family service. Although not many churches run their Nativity plays on Christmas, probably because it sounds like a huge effort just when people least need the stress, in practice we find that it works really well, and is not too intrusive on family Christmas time.
These plays were all written by Martin Dove, former leader of Sunday school at St John's, and we are pleased to offer them to any church or other group that wants to use them with no cost and no conditions.
Here is where you can download any of our scripts in either pdf (nice for browsing) or Microsoft Word (for editing) formats:
We retain copyright of these plays, "just in case", but we don't aim to exert any rights in normal circumstances. And we certainly don't want to charge any fees.
The Christmas story is incredibly rich. There are so many facets to the story, and so many messages. In just one play it is impossible to touch on many of the details, and by the same token it is not so difficult to have variety from one year to the next. We tend to focus on one perspective each year, such as the angles or the kings, or the sense of giving or discovery.
Our aim is to present the central truth of Christmas, namely that God loves us and gave us His Son to be our saviour. The Christmas story is incredibly exciting. At long last, after years of seeing His people struggle with the consequences of sin, God has started his great plan of redemption. Each year this thought takes away our breath!
The plays were designed within the context of the following situation:
In terms of operation, you may be interested to know about some of the small details of how we stage these plays and manage practices:
As we noted above, we are pleased to make our scripts available for any church groups to use. You may like to get in touch before you use one of our scripts to get additional information. We will always give permission to use these scripts, with no charges and no conditions (e.g. you are free to edit and adapt in any way you like, you do not need to acknowledge us), so certainly please don't feel the need to ask permission. But we are really heartened to hear whenever we how the plays are used in various different situations. Please contact Martin Dove via our church office as the main author to let him know; he is always pleased to hear from people who want to make use of these. And we are always delighted to receive photographs from your church, school or community production.