School’s Out, Kids In!
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We love having an intergenerational church that welcomes and includes people of all ages within our everyday church, every week.
Normally, everyone begins in church together, and after around 45 minutes, the children from babies through to year six head out for their own, age-specific Bible teaching whilst the high school youths and older remain in church for the sermon.
However, during these school holidays we’re going to trial something new called ‘School’s Out, Kids In,’ where the kindergarten, infants and primary-aged school students will remain in church for the whole time, as we tweak our service to make it even more suitable to younger people.
This will mean that during these school holidays we’ll skip our normal Question Time, we’ll aim to have the sermon a little shorter, and we’ll make a number of minor tweaks that will help our younger people participate more with us all.
Our prayer is that this will help our kids feel that attending church is a normal experience for everyone, so that they will never know a time when they’re not welcomed and embraced fully during church.
The other benefit of this is that it means our children’s ministry team will have a break during the school holidays, allowing some holiday kids helpers to enjoy serving the younger kids in the creche program during the sermon.
We also will be blessed as our children’s minister Rach Bemmer is able to creatively shape church, as she leads the services, and works hard behind the scenes to help church be even better for kids as well as grown ups.
This holiday it’s just a trial, so we’d love your feedback as we seek to strengthen our ministry to younger people, as well as all of us as we enjoy life together, all ages and stages together in church.
JODIE McNEILL