When your kids' Christmas gifts arrive on the doorstep from Amazon in a few months, many people's excitement may give way to panic when they see those dreaded words "Some Assembly Required." But for worship planners like you, assembling is second nature.

You do it every week, carefully selecting music, prayers, litanies, visuals, and more from various resources and crafting them into a unified and meaningful experience of worship! Whether you use them as is, tweak lines here and there, or just use the idea as a jumping-off point to write your own, you make good use of these "ready to use" worship resources.

Especially at Advent and Christmas, when there are special events to plan, class parties to attend, family responsibilities to juggle—all on top of designing and implementing worship services that will be among the best-attended of the year—you need "ready-to-use" resources you can trust.

The Ministry Matters team is working hard to get This Sunday bins for Advent up as soon as possible so you can make use of our litanies, prayers, sermon starters, children's sermons, and more in your Advent planning.

But to give you a jumpstart, help yourself to this free sample from Worship in a Flash for Advent and Christmas, a new collection of sermons, prayers, services, songs, and projection images all on an easy-to-tote flash drive.

Included on the drive are the following:

• Thematic sermons/sermon briefs for Advent, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day/Christmas Sunday, including two sermon series.

• Lectionary-based sermons/sermon briefs for all the Sundays of Advent and Christmas for Years A, B, and C.

• Complete services for all the Sundays of Advent and Christmas, including sermons

• Suggested hymns, contemporary songs, solos, and anthems for each of the Sundays of Advent and Christmas.

• Multiple selections of prayers and litanies for each of the Sundays of Advent and Christmas, including the Prayers and Litanies for the First Sunday of Advent, downloadable for FREE below!

It’s hard to experience the joy of the season when you’re running around exhausted and stressed. So happy Advent-planning and Merry Christmas from Ministry Matters!