I had a great conversation with Sue Zawodny this morning in regards to small groups in children’s programming. We aren’t looking to reformat anything in a major way, we just want to be more clear and intentional with what we do. It’s a little difficult considering that one of our children’s programming is called religious education. When I hear that name I think back to my religious education or when it was called CCD (don’t know what that means) and we had workbooks, we had a teacher teaching from a teacher’s workbook, we took that book home, did homework and then brought it back the next week. At Nativity we’ve gotten away from that and taken on more of a small group feel. We’ve realized we only have kids for about 30 hours a year, so instead of filling their heads with a year’s worth of information we concentrate on developing fellowship skills, give them opportunities to discover their gifts and learn about how God loves them, is with them and wants to get to know them.
We need to better communicate this, we are looking to get away from the name Religious Ed and call it something else, basically because it is and is becoming something else. One thing we’ll see over time is see all of our children’s programming take on more of a small group feel (with the exception of Time Travelers). We already see it in All Stars (programming for 3-6 year olds) and we are starting to see it in Religious Ed…we just need to be clearer and more intentional about making it happen.