Children, youth, & Sunday school

Worship, Learning, and Fellowship for everyone

Including people of all ages in the life of our church is important to us.

Sunday School, including infant and toddler care, is offered to all children. Children are with the whole congregation for the beginning of worship, which includes a message just for them, before going off to Sunday School. 

One of the priorities our congregation has been working on in recent years is teaching children/youth about worship and offering them opportunities to worship. For a summary of reasons why churches should consider all-ages worship services, see this PDF file.

To move in this direction of helping our children and youth mature into adult disciples, the worship committee, all-ages worship team, and staff members have been looking at how our current worship service could be more welcoming of youth/children. Over the past years we have made some small changes to the weekly worship service (i.e. shaker instruments for children who may be too young to read song lyrics) and scheduled quarterly intergenerational services during our school year when children/youth joined us for the entire worship service (younger children, birth-K, were still welcomed in the Nursery).

Since 2018 we have incorporated a monthly All-Ages Worship service schedule. This will help us try more things, allow more people to experience this worship service, and solicit more feedback that will help us better live into our UCCVF priority.

These services are intended to be a “regular Sunday worship” that better include and integrate our young people. We have changed some elements, we have left other elements as they typically are. We have been and will continue to evaluate this experience and continue to pray and reflect about next steps to help us be a more fully inclusive community of adults, children, and youth so that we can better form disciples and grow as disciples of Christ who will multiply God’s healing life in the world.