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By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster

I personally love the time I get to spend with the 5th and 6th graders. Developmentally they are expressive, talkative, love explaining things, and once they do calm down enough to listen they are beginning to trust one another enough to share some of the tender worries and sorrows of life with one another. Fifth and sixth graders are growing on multiple fronts all at once, gaining socio-emotional, cognitive, and language skills; physical characteristics (height, weight, coordination, eye sight, and so on) change too.

In the midst of all this the church’s role is to weave a web of love so that they know that God’s presence infuses all of it—that Jesus’ radical love for the least, the lost, and the unloved can and does make a life-saving difference in the complicated matrix of school, family, and friendship. On Sundays 5th and 6th graders have a chapel of song, prayer, an important scripture message, and then they go to Sunday School where they spend the year building a mock Bible Habitat, a way to learn about the Ancient Near Eastern culture that was Jesus’ home. On Wednesdays, 5th and 6th graders run into the 417 Warwick Manse (our church house for youth) where our agenda is to play and pray (usually we play a beloved game called Catacombs… we’re not sure why it’s so beloved, it just is). In deepest gratitude for every minute I get to spend with your 5th and 6th graders.

• Sundays 10:30–11:30 a.m. (Schmidt Chapel and Basement Room #1)
• Wednesdays 5–6 p.m. (417 Warwick Manse and Culbertson Room)