Dear Redeemer family,
Our parish is growing every year and we continue to prayerfully seek the best ways to lead our children’s ministry at Redeemer. Learning from older, more established children’s ministries in our diocese, we see the summer months provide two opportunities for our parish. One is to allow our hard-working Sunday school volunteers a much needed chance to slow down. The other is to embrace more child participation during the worship service for the summer season, for the sake of both our children and the adults around them! As our parish moves into the season of Ordinary Time and we find ways to practice our faith in, well, ordinary ways, this is a wonderful time to shift the way we teach our children spiritual formation for a season as well.
WHEN WILL THIS TAKE PLACE?
Redeemer Kids will only offer Three’s Room, Pre-K Room, and the full nursery for both services starting Sunday June 4-July 30. In August, our full children’s spiritual formation classes will be offered again and spend 3 weeks getting back into the weekly rhythms of meeting before we fully relaunch our curriculum in the fall with the rest of the parish.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR OUR KIDS
We will be creating a children’s liturgy specifically for our young children to help guide them through the service (and to doodle on of course) as well as ziploc bags of crayons to borrow. Our school-aged children will have the opportunity to be welcomed into portions of the service that they have not been in before, to learn alongside our older members during the sermon and to practice corporate prayer during Prayers of the People. This is not a break from children’s spiritual formation, rather, a new way to practice it together!
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PARENTS
If your child is a rising kindergartener or older, she’ll be sitting with you for the whole service! We will offer some resources specifically for these children to engage with the service. As I am envisioning this change, I picture my own 5 year old boy needing a few weeks to adjust to the new rhythm of sitting for longer stretches and finding ways to engage during the sermon. It will be a challenge for him and our family alike as we all adapt, but I urge each family to allow for the time needed to adjust as well as grace for everyone around you.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR REDEEMER KIDS VOLUNTEERS
Our hope is to give our hard-working Redeemer Kids teachers, assistants, coordinators, and more a season to slow down in the year! Many of you might not know that we ask our teachers and assistants to serve every 3 weeks and our coordinators and nursery volunteers to serve every 4 weeks. As the year has gone on, many of our team members have served more frequently than that in order to have the 30 volunteers needed every Sunday to run our children’s ministry. For those who are not currently serving in Redeemer Kids, take this season to thank our Redeemer Kids volunteers and to prayerfully consider how you could use your own gifts to volunteer as well; you’re needed!
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR EVERYONE ELSE
This is a wonderful opportunity to engage in a new way with the children of our parish! There will be opportunities to stretch and grow as a congregation together as we extend hospitality to the school-aged children of our church in different ways and to support and interact with families with young children in the pews next around you. Here are a few practical guidelines to consider:
The first way you can help is to model attentive and fully engaged behavior for the kids around you! Children learn the most by observing, and by staying focused when listening and then using your body to kneel, stand, extend your hands, etc., you are already discipling the children around you.
Get to know the names of the children who sit near you in particular and then ask after them by name each week. This small gesture can mean the world to children (or anybody for that matter) who can often feel overlooked in a crowd.
When a child near you is noisy (drops a pen, cries, giggles, talks out loud) during the silent portions of the service, don’t react. This could take practice for each of us, but stay engaged in the prayer/silence/liturgy and take this time as an opportunity to grow in focus and to model still and calm posture for your neighbors. (This is a spiritual “muscle” we can all exercise!)
Be open to how you can grow from this experience. During this summer and beyond, be attentive to how children already naturally engage with the service on their own. Do they shout the creeds or dance when they sing? Do they find it hard to be attentive during the scripture reading or to withhold their enthusiasm when they are able to participate in a call and response? Children reflect our emotions, desires, and sin patterns, but are often more open about it! Be open to what you can learn about yourself from watching these children, and how you can grow in your own faith through this!
In Christ,
Casey Cisco
Director of Redeemer Kids
