Children and teens are a very important part of our church family! They are active participants in our worship, music, and outreach ministries.
There is Sunday School, taught by lay volunteers, for children in preschool-grade 8 most Sundays when school is in session from September-May. Children attend the worship service in the Sanctuary with their families until the Time for Children, after which they and their teachers leave for the Christian Education Wing. Families are reunited at Coffee Hour following the service.
We also hold regular study groups for adults.
More about Sunday School
More about Habitat Crew
More about Confirmation
More about Adult Programs
Pastor Carrie’s Statement About our Christian Education Program
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Today as we say good bye to Kathy Noble and Christine Noble-Drosehn, it is the last day this church will have an employee whose direct responsibility it is to minister with and to our children and youth. My exhortation to all of you is this: that does not mean an end to the responsibility. It means that you and I together will need to take on the enormously important work of raising our children in the faith and helping them grow into ethical and compassionate adults.
Members of our congregational cluster have been struggling with the question of how we do this for the last several months. The most immediate and seemingly desperate question is who will take on the job of Sunday School? As pastor, I can help but I can’t be in two places at once. How is it going to happen?
Here is a nutshell version of what I’ve been thinking during this time: maybe Sunday School is not the most important thing. Many of you do not know the history behind Sunday School; the concept itself is less than two hundred years old, and it began in England as a way of ministry to the poor children in the mill neighborhoods, inviting them to come to school on Sunday, the only day when they were not at work in the mills. It may have focused on teaching them to read from the Bible, apparently to teach them the Christian faith. But more importantly it was about teaching them to read, period: about finding a way to meet their need to grow into intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate adults.
Somewhere along the way, rather like public school education which replaced it, it became what educators call the “banking” concept of teaching – we the adults attempt to put a certain quantity of ideas, Bible stories, and rules – into the heads of the children. It doesn’t work very well in regular schools, and it doesn’t work all that well in Sunday School either. Very few kids who’ve been all the way through in Sunday School classes could pass an Advance Placement exam in Christianity!
What is it that sticks with children who are raised in the church? What is it that stuck with you and brought you into the life of the church as adult? If you are like me, it was all that stuff which belongs to the right brain: songs, memorized psalms and prayers, relationship with others, helping to do some ministry side by side with adults, etc. Not necessarily what happened in Sunday School.
So what do we need to go forward with a children’s ministry? We need people who love and respect children and are willing to spend time with them, singing together, playing together, working together. What that looks like we will have to figure out. How we can combine it with ministry to children in general children in the wider community who could use some of what we have to offer. Help us dream together.
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