When I arrived at MLUC, I was told that there was one Sunday each month for the kids called Faith in Action and the goal was for kids to participate in some of the social action projects of the church.  I struggled a little bit for the past two years to make this ideal a reality.  We had Faith in Action Sundays, and some of them were quite meaningful and engaging, but they rarely related in more than a superficial way to social action in the congregation.  This year I am fortunate enough to have been able to gather a working group to help make something better out of these Sundays.  Mia Carpiniello, Carrie Nielsen, Amy Kokas and I met recently to plan out the themes for the year.  We agreed that our goal is for each Faith in Action Sunday to be meaningful and provide kids with an opportunity to do something that will make a real, tangible difference in the world.

We started by coordinating with the Book Drive organized by members of the church.  Ruth Bowen came and told the kids about why we were doing a book drive and where the books would end up.  Then kids had a choice between sorting books already received, making bookmarks to give with the books, or doing a loving-kindness meditation for the recipients.  Everyone seemed engaged and I think they understood why we were doing what we were doing.

Other themes for the year include LGBTQIA support, immigration, racial justice, and care packages for lonely elders.  For the final Faith in Action Sunday of the year, we’ll include the kids in choosing one or more longer-term projects to work on over the course of several months next program year!

If you have a social action project or team working on one of these already selected themes and would like to connect what you are doing with what we are doing, please reach out to me!  If you have a project or team working on something else and you wish we had chosen that as a focus, also reach out!  We can’t do everything in one year but there may be times other than Faith in Action Sundays that a particular class could participate in something you’re doing.  Final word: we deliberately did not choose environmental justice as a focus because we’d like to focus the summer program in 2020 on environmental learning!