Tag Archives: faith formation

How Is Educational Ministry Going At Your Church?

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Thank you to unsplash.com for this picture

Happy New Year!

And, how is it going?

Thank you for all you’ve been doing to continue providing faith formation practices and Christian education programming for your church over the past couple of years. Providing educational ministry for all ages during Covid has been an incredible challenge and you have pivoted, adapted and changed focus each step of the way.

We’ve learned a lot too. We’ve highlighted families and the significant role parents play in the passing on of faith to their children, we’ve learned far more about technology than we ever imagined, we’ve embraced the word ‘hybrid’ and are beginning to understand that multiple points of access will be the new normal going forward, and we’ve come to see our church as not a building but a gathering no matter how that happens.

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Come Play in the Garden

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A couple of weeks ago I invited you to ‘Save the Space’ for an exciting new interactive Lent resource being created for your church. I teased you with a picture of a Lent Garden wall beautifully decorated with flowers, a garden gnome and a picnic basket filled with tasty treats. I said every item in the garden would unlock a collection of bible readings, videoed stories, crafts, music, and other garden adventures for your congregation to explore every week of Lent.

And then I said, “but not quite yet.”

Well today is the day! Today is the day I want to unlock the first two of six Lent Gardens for you to explore for yourself.

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Free Resources From Illustrated Ministry for Your Church and Church Families

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Are you looking to take a short break from your regular Sunday school lessons to keep everyone engaged? Would you like to give your Sunday school teachers a bit of a planning break? Perhaps you’d like to supplement your Sunday school lessons with a mid-week email to help build a bridge between one Sunday and the next by providing additional, related materials. Or, perhaps you’ve been sending out devotions and activities over Advent and want to assist your families in keeping up their newly established practice of reading bible stories together and doing fun activities at home.

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Living in An Ice Age

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It’s 34°C in Toronto today, with a humidex reading of 41°C (that’s 93° and 105° for those who live in Fahrenheit locales). It’s been steadily hot and dry for the past week with no relief in sight, so it seems a little odd that I want to talk about an ice age today. But, it has been proposed, an ice age is coming.

Prompted by recent articles I’ve read, along with conversations I’ve been having with other church educators, I want to spend a bit of time in this article considering what we’ll be doing this fall in the area faith formation. This spring we were challenged by the initial weeks and months of the Covid-19 pandemic. We rose to the challenge as we accommodated children and youth in online worship, ‘Zoomed’ Sunday schools, bible studies, and coffee hours. We worked really hard to keep relationships our greatest priority in the face of physical distancing. We revised and re-wrote VBS curriculum, dropped off bible storybooks to homes for families to read together, and circulated a daily family examen as a great way to grow faith at home over these summer months.

While all of these adaptive approaches have been welcomed and celebrated in our churches, we are still left with the question, “What about the fall?” It sits there on the horizon and, as many are suggesting, our continuing approach to faith formation will be very different for many more months to come.

So, how do we do educational ministry in an ice age?

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