grovekidsIf you are interested in learning about what’s involved in serving in the Greenhouse, come to a brief interest meeting on Sunday, November 23rd at 10:45 a.m. in the Greenhouse (of course). We’ll be making the spring volunteer schedule in just a few weeks, so now is the time to check out our ministry.
We’ve added two new dates for Elementary and Preschool Kids to attend worship with their parents: November 30 and December 28. We’ll send out an email reminder as the time approaches.
We had a great day in worship today as we prayed for our brothers and sisters in Christ who are being persecuted throughout the world. Each year at this time, my heart is touched by the amazing stories of real people who pay the ultimate price for their faith.
Jim mentioned some great resources for adults–ways that you can be informed about what is going on in the Church and ways you can pray. He also briefly mentioned Kids of Courage, which is a great resource for parents to use with their children. Notice I said “with their children”. Here is a brief statement to parents and educatiors from the website: “Kids of Courage materials convey the struggles endured by persecuted Christians without including graphic descriptions or photos, or age-inappropriate concepts. Nevertheless, parents and teachers are encouraged to preview the materials before sharing them with their own children, as they know their children best.” Here is the link to Kids of Courage. Check it out.
And I’d also encourage all parents to go to the Voice of the Martyrs website to sign up for the free monthly newsletter. Ultimately, our kids will care most about the perseucted church when they see that we care. And we will care about the persecuted church when we know about the persecuted church. So, sign up. Learn. And care.
Over the past six months, several parents and Greenhouse team members
have talked with me about the possibility of having a playground to
the west of our building. Well, I have great news–we are now a few
steps closer to making that a reality. First of all, we’ve had some
generous donations toward a playground project, and secondly
Fellowship Bible Church has committed to give laborers, time and
equipment to help us with the very first stage of the project.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we have a little drainage problem
on the west side of our building. Whenever it rains, water collects
there, and that area stays soggy for a long time. Well, after doing
some research, we found out that we need to regrade the surface.
A team from Fellowship will be working on this project this week and
re-seeding our lawn so that grass will grow again.
After this is completed, our next step will be getting that area
fenced (a project you can help with when that time comes). Then in the future, we’ll look into play equipment. Even without play equipment, it will be nice to have a place where our kids
can run and play safely. I’m looking forward to having a playground
soon. Keep your eyes peeled for progress as you come to the Greenhouse
this week.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I loved the Operation Christmas Child video that was shared in the worship gathering today. My kids really enjoy putting together gifts for Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes, and they especially liked seeing the kids in the video with their gifts. I heard that we ran out of boxes at the Info Cafe today, but you can get all the info you need to put together a shoebox here.
Hey, if you are serving in the Greenhouse, did you know that you can access the volunteer schedule AND the list of lessons and scriptures for your class online? Just go to the Greenhouse page and click on “Team Members Only”.
So, if you are a last minute sub for someone and you don’t have the lesson materials at hand, you can at least look up the scripture for the week and prepare by reading through it. Or if you are an Elementary teacher and you want to plan ahead to come up with creative ideas for your activites, you can see what’s coming up.
Hope this resource will be helpful for you all.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: book recommendations, Grove talks, suffering
On Sunday, Kent taught us from 1 Peter about suffering for being Christian. Do you know what was happening to Christians at the time Peter wrote this? In Rome, Christians were the scapegoats for every problem. If something bad happened, Christians were unfairly accused, then persecuted. They were sent to fight the lions, be burned to death (even as “living torches” at the emperors parties!). It was a gruesome time. Knowing this underlines Peter’s words so much more for me. He was telling these people, the ones fighting the lions, to rejoice in their suffering and realize that it was God’s will for them. Now, that is intense!
My kids and I have learned so much from the book Trial and Triumph: Stories from Church History by Richard M. Hannula. If you want to read more about the persecutions of the early church, get this book. It’s really interesting and enlightening. Last night at dinner, we recalled examples of real people in this book to help explain the meaning of this week’s Fighter Verse to our kids. We talked about Polycarp and Blandina, real people from long ago who suffered and died for their faith.
On a technical note, this book would be a great independent read for older elementary students or middle school students. Since we have younger students, I read it aloud to them.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Christians should be outdoors enjoying the beautiful world that God has made. The creation testifies to the Creator!
Here’s a great article about benefits of getting outside for one hour per day. It’s not from a Christian perspective, but I think Christian kids can benefit from this idea, for sure.
Today, I am reading some materials by Mike Ashcroft. (Thanks Ashley R. for passing them along.) He affirms something important that we do in the Greenhouse–keeping structure. But he also suggests that within that structure, we need to throw in a little spice. We need to shake things up. We need novelty.
So, when you come into the Greenhouse, you know that you’re going to do the same things each week. Teach a Bible lesson, work on Scripture memory and do some activities that reinforce what you’ve taught. I would encourage you to stick with the established schedule but to vary the activities that you do each week. For instance, one Sunday, you should act out the Bible passage together. One week you should use the felt board to tell the story. One week you should get out the glue and scissors and do a craft that reinforces the lesson.
This will require some time and creativity on the part of the teachers. But I think the pay off is worth it. A little novelty can go a long way to making a lesson memorable.
We were blessed to get to attend Family Camp this week at New Life Ranch. It was amazing. In fact, Elspeth said it was better than vacation. That’s a pretty good review, I’d say.
Family Camp was essentially like regular “church” camp, but you attend with your whole family. Parents attend two worship and teaching sessions per day, and kids attend age-appropriate programs during those sessions. Additionally there is time set aside each morning for families to have morning devotions.
During the afternoons and late evenings, families are encouraged to have fun together. Afternoons are unstructured free time from 1:15 until 5:30. During that time, we swam, went on a guided creek hike, rode ponies, canoed, fished and ate junk food at the canteen. Other opportunities available during that time include zip line, screamer, 2 water slides, the blob, kayaking, trail rides, basketball, skeet shooting, archery, riflery and more. During the evenings, the camp staff had wonderful things planned for us: a country fair (inflatables, pony rides, face painting, cotton candy, games, square dancing, etc), fireworks, and a talent show.
One of the best things about our time at NLR was the incredible staff. Each family who attends Family Camp is assigned a counselor. This counselor is there to serve and love your family during your stay. Counselors can help by watching a younger child while parents go do activities with their older kids or they can help you with your trays in the dining hall or they can search frantically for band-aids when your child gets blisters on her feet from being in the pool for too many hours in one day. These counselors can help you get your kids to their activities and they can even wake your kids up, get them ready for breakfast and take them to breakfast while you go on an adults only breakfast trail ride. (We didn’t take advantage of that opportunity this year, but maybe we will in the future.)
We were so blessed by our counselor, Emily. She loved on our girls, swam with them, delivered them to various activities when Brett and I were busy with other things and generally made them feel like the most special girls at camp. Emily was great!
Another highlight of our time was Tuesday evening. Parents were treated to a delicious, sit-down dinner with their choice of steak, roasted red pepper chicken or shrimp scampi (not your usual idea of camp food, huh?) while kids were treated to parties complete with pizza, s’mores and tons of fun.
If you are looking for a way to spend some quality and quantity time with your family as well as some time to refresh spiritually, I would strongly recommend NLR family camp. They will be accepting registrations for next year beginning next week. I’d love it if several families from The Grove could attend Family Camp together next year. We’d have a blast!
One last kudos to NLR: Not only was the summer staff incredible, the full time staff were amazing. We were blessed by all that they do, year-round, to make NLR a great ministry. We enjoyed hanging out with our NLR staff friends from The Grove: The Freemans, The Wests and The Harrises. Thanks guys, for ministering to us through your friendship and through all that you do through NLR.
