While moms and teachers were attending the women’s retreat last weekend, the dads combined forces to lead the Multiage and Middler classes in a lesson with lots of action and energy. Beginning with an interactive drama (that we will perform on Children’s Sunday!) featuring some disciples, a jail, chains, and an earthquake, the kids (and dads) jumped right into the fun. Upon reflection after the drama, the children thought about what binds them (worries, nervous thoughts, insecurities) and how God helps to free them while the dads wrapped up groups of kids with crepe paper. God’s love then shook them up like an earthquake and the kids wriggled free of the bindings! Lots of laughter – lots of mess – so much fun! Creating prop chains, making disciple signs, and building Lego scenes of the drama rounded out the day with the dads. Many thanks to Josh Torgerson, Jeff Tustin, and Carlin Andrus for leading the day while the moms were away!

On Sunday our Multiage class read the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin and spent the morning searching for lost things! Have you ever lost anything special? Do you remember looking for it? How did you feel when you found it? These were questions we asked and wondered about as we celebrated how amazing it feels to be “found” by God and welcomed into God’s Kingdom with a joyful party – even if we do something wrong. Check out our pictures for a description of our WONDER-ful day together!

Angels have been hovering all around us this Advent season, and we continued this theme last Sunday in our multiage Sunday school class.  After lighting our third candle in our Advent wreath and a candlelit opening combining all three classes, the multiage children enjoyed finding angels illustrated in the book The Nativity by Julie Vivas and then watched a fantastic short video called An Unexpected Christmas, featuring God’s host of angels very surprised by God’s plan for Jesus’ birth.  Check out the video here.  We then explored three different activity stations: decorating angel coloring pages, creating sparkly angel messages, and reading Christmas books in an ever-expanding twinkling fort.  The reading fort started under one table with three children, then grew (with the help of some very motivated kid engineers) to encompass the entire stage to fit everyone.  Always room for one more!