There is a rhythm to every community. A time when you can guarantee a few Sundays of light attendance. Sometimes it falls around a weeklong school break  Sometimes it falls around a holiday typically filled with travelling and over-doing-it. So what do we do about THOSE Sundays?

The Sundays after Christmas and after New Year’s Day are two of the six that can cause this Children’s Ministry Director to toss her hands up in frustration, or…..we do our best to make them especially special!

This year we will host a PAJAMA PRAISE PARTY the Sunday after Christmas.  Everyone gets new PJs for Christmas, so kids and volunteers will be sporting them with the Youth hosting us with a hot chocolate bar during Sunday School.  We’ll gather in the gym in our jammies, eat some jacked-up hot cocoa, then head back to The Great Room to decorate huge Gingerbread cookies and jam out to Praise Songs.  11 o’clock worship service will look lively for sure.

On the Sunday following New Year’s Day, we’ve invited a Titus 2 Mystery Guest to speak with a special activity.  Baby Girl and #1 Son can give personal testimony when they were little people about the influence of having someone just a bit older sharing about their journey of faith .  They can name the young man who purposed in his heart to be a ‘delight’ to his parents as a teenager, the young woman who purposed in her heart to maintain relationship boundaries, and the multiple missionaries who gave testimony of their week-long, months-long, and whole life experiences of sharing the Good News of Jesus around the world.

Year before last, our church’s theme was “go into all the world and preach the Good News to all creation.”  Every other month we invited a young person to share of their missionary experiences.

• On Easter Sunday, a young woman shared she had been going with her family to Honduras every year since she can remember on a short term mission trip.  Immediately following, our youth began talking about going to Honduras.  Last year, these same students partnered with the young woman’s home church and did just that.  They made it happen in just a year’s time.  And they are going back next summer.
• Another young woman visited and shared of her difficulties in the mission field in West Africa.  One of my girls came away telling me and anyone else who would listen that God is calling her to Russia and she has purposed in her heart to make it happen no matter the difficulties she may face.
• Another young girl, a senior in high school, shared about her receiving Operation Child Christmas Shoe boxes in a Latvian Salvation Army orphanage as a little person.  She was adopted into a family of home-church friend’s of ours as I met her on a Chrysalis Flight the summer before.  Just an FYI…the best gifts in the boxes she received:  bubble gum and flavored toothpaste.  Now, every shoe box that leaves Wesley Chapel has bubble gum and flavored toothpaste in it.

Our Titus 2 Mystery Guest will be sharing with my little people on the Sunday following New Year’s Day.  This very special young person is a student at Georgia Tech and that’s all I’m going to say about that because the mystery matters.  And I can’t wait to see what God will spark in the heart and mind of a child a direction, a purpose, or an intention from the testimony of His own.

“Teach the older men…teach the older women…then they can train the younger women…and encourage the young men…In everything set them an example by doing what is good.”  Titus 2:2-7a.