Children, Youth and Family Ministry

There are many things to highlight this year for Children, Youth, and Family Ministry. It’s been an exciting time at St. James as the teams leading ministry have started to work on completing the goals for Children, Youth, and Families. See below for a copy of the goals from our 2010 Visioning Booklet.

Goals for our Children:

1. Create a better environment for fellowship time to increase the amount of families participating.
2. Enhance the current structure and training of the Rotation model to better facilitate relationship building between students and their teachers.
3. Work with creative worship team on topics to be used simultaneously in worship and Kid’s Connect to increase faith-based discussions at home.  
   

Goals for our Junior High:

1. Change the name of confirmation to “affirmation” to accurately reflect the purpose of re-affirming the promises that were made for young people at their baptism on behalf of their parents and the worshipping community.
2. Incorporate a relational model of doing ministry into the current educational model of affirmation in the following ways: intentional faith-based friendships with peers, more group service projects, creating a summer youth group program, and organizing multi-church events.
3. Build on the core content of the curriculum, by expanding training and support for confirmation teachers and mentors to lead the students in becoming deeper disciples of Christ.
   

Goals for our Senior High:

1. Utilize the group process model of youth leadership to have more effective faith discussions, reaching out to more teens within St. James, and to equip youth to take ownership of the program, which will transform the direction of this ministry.
2. Designate and schedule functional space for senior high youth specifically for their regular use in addition to other age groups.
3. Continue to expand the Box City event for further outreach to our community and to develop stronger relationships with youth outside of St. James.

New Longterm Ministry:

Milestone’s ministry is new program at St. James.  Every young person has significant faith milestones in their faith journey. We lift these times up as sacred events for the congregation to support and encourage young people and their families as they continue on their journey. Milestones include Baptism, 1st day of school, 1st Bible, First Holy Communion, Affirmation, getting your license and much more! As a young person gets baptized they are given a milestone’s faith chest.

At each milestone we give a memento to remember the milestone. As the milestones come up in a young person’s life we contact the families and set up a time to recognize the occasion and help parents learn about how they can share this experience with their kids in a faith filled way. As they graduate high school we ask the young adult to bring their milestone faith chest to church and recall the memories they had growing up on their faith journey.

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