By Joyce Landers, Vice President of the United Thank Offering Board

One of the projects we were most excited to launch at General Convention was our collaboration with Illustrated Ministries to turn the “General Thanksgiving,” found in the back of your “Book of Common Prayer,” into an interactive experience. We’re so excited to share these coloring sheets with you. They are in English and Spanish with “simple” and “detailed” designs to choose from. (You can see all the coloring pages here.) To help make these materials more useful to congregations, we’ve created formation materials to go along with the coloring sheets. We’ve got materials for children and families as well as young adults and adults. For kids, we’ve got amazing new formation lessons from the Rev. Rowan Larson—and for adults, a journal with weekly coloring sheets and themes to help deepen a gratitude practice or help to create one. 

We also had Illustrated Ministries create a color-your-own Blue Box! A fun way to help get everyone involved in thinking about gratitude, the color-your-own box is available as a download or from our distribution center. Because we want to see how creative you all are, we’ve created a coloring contest for the new box. All the information about the coloring contest, including how to order boxes or submit photos, can be found here. While the materials are available for use at any time, the coloring contest does end in December.

We can’t wait to see what you come up with and to share your colorful UTO Blue Boxes!