Choosing Curriculum Roundtable

Choosing Curriculum Roundtable

Join with fellow educators as Tori Smit, Regional Minister for Faith Formation Synod of Central, Northeastern Ontario and Bermuda, offers tips, insights and tools on choosing curriculum fitting for your time and space in your ministry! You will leave this roundtable...

Five Favourite Children’s Bible Story Books

Your Advocate Ministry Team has been enjoying sharing our series of five favourites with you this summer. Today’s list of five favourite children’s bible storybooks took very little time to assemble as we kept interrupting each other trying to get our personal favourites onto the list.

As with our previous lists, we hope you’ll pop your favourite children’s bible storybooks into the comments section and tell us your reasons for favouring it over the many available for us all to choose from.

Five Favourite Children’s Picture Books

Over the next several weeks, we, members of the Advocate Ministry Team, will be sharing our five favorite things. These articles are meant to be interactive. Each time we post an article, we will share our favorites, and then we will ask you to add your own favorites...

What Will We Tell the Children?

by Tori Smit It was a Good Friday service I will never forget. I was perhaps eight or nine years old and since children in my church rarely joined the adults in the sanctuary for any part of worship going to worship on Good Friday was a very big deal for me. I wanted...
Covid Keepers: Ideas to Continue in the Post-Pandemic Church

Covid Keepers: Ideas to Continue in the Post-Pandemic Church

       .   When considering how to engage families in the story of the resurrection this year, our team wanted to focus on a family activity that respected our current congregational safety guidelines. I happened to be on the launch team for ‘Twas the Morning of...

Lessons Learned from Virtual VBS

As churches have made adjustments to their regular Christian education programming since the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Advocate blog (and APCE leaders) have offered suggestions for program adjustments. We thought we’d follow up with one congregation who...

Back-to-School (or Virtual School) Blessing

Many churches mark the back-to-school season with a Blessing of Backpacks for children, families, teachers, and leaders who are returning to the classroom after summer break. This ritual is a tangible reminder that God is present everywhere and accompanies us in every...

Talking to Your Children About COVID-19

By Kathy L. Dawson I’ve heard many people wondering about how much to tell children about what is currently happening in our world. My own advice, coming off my years of experience working in the childhood grief arena, is to listen to the questions that the children...

Noticing Gave us a LIFT

It started with some noticings. We noticed that our Sunday morning church school attendance was getting smaller. We noticed that children were attending less frequently—we’d have a child in class one Sunday and then not see that child again for the next three weeks....