Children at Central
Children and youth are loved and active at Central! We include them in worship leadership, have age-appropriate classrooms and programs, and nurture intergenerational connections. We have a bright, welcoming nursery and a paid nursery care attendant to care for infants and young children.
In the classrooms that the kids are in, we take special care to have religious art that reflects several different ethnic viewpoints on Jesus and the characters from the Bible. We have several immigrant families with kids, and we have several families who have been attending Central for generations. It's an exciting, eclectic mix of kids, all ages from babies to teens, and it just happens that they are all very well-behaved!
We do special events as well, to involve them in new ways of learning and participation. The kids take the lead in helping sell shares in the Heifer Project, where people can donate to alternative gift ideas at Christmas time in missions around the world - and it's the kids who do the work in organizing and promoting it. We have special classes with ideas like the "Mideast Feast" where kids got to sample dates and figs and baklava, and also got to hold a mustard seed to see what tiny thing Jesus was talking about in his metaphors.
We want the kids to feel welcomed, challenged, involved, and taken seriously at Central. They are more than the future of the church - to us, they are the church!