Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter

Welcome Back to the Blog! The month of March has been a great time downstairs at FCC's Children's Empowerment Workshop. We have been focusing on Standing Up for ourselves. We have focused in on this topic through a variety discussion topics, Bible verses, children's books, and art projects. A good time has been had by all. We are not nearly done talking about Standing Up for ourselves and will probably need another month on this topic before we are ready to move on to our next Stand Up topic. But, before we even think about that we need to pause for the very important days approaching on the church calendar. These days are Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Easter. We will have special church activities on all of these days and you are welcome to attend and participate in all of them.

Palm Sunday

This Sunday April 5th is Palm Sunday. During the second service of worship at FCC we will be waving palm branches and possibly even the ribbons to celebrate Palm Sunday. This is always a fun event for the children. During the Children's Empowerment Workshop (aka Sunday school) we will have two very special activities taking place. 

The first one is that we will be tie dying shirts with the youth. The youth are tie dying as part of their "youth groupie" program and the children will be tie dying because it is fun and festive! The children's shirts will later be silk screen printed with a Stand Up! logo as part of Children's Empowerment Workshop theme. The second activity for Palm Sunday is that we will be making pretzels. This is one of our traditional lenten activities and Palm Sunday is the last day to sneak in our pretzel lesson before we move onto the fatty, fun, and festive days of Easter. 

In order to tie dye this Sunday I need all the parents to comment to the blog, email, or call me (whatever is easiest) with the sizes of shirts their children wear. Christa will be purchasing shirts on Friday so we need all shirt orders in by Thursday evening! If your child will not be at church on Sunday we would love to dye a shirt for them so PLEASE email me the size regardless of if you know you will be in attendance or not! We will discuss the price of the shirts later after the expenses come in. It should not be prohibitive and if it is please let me know and we can work it out. What is most important is that ALL kids get to participate in one way or another.

Holy Week

We have one activity for the children taking place during Holy Week. This activity will be our annual Maundy Thursday dinner, egg dying party, and service. Maundy Thursday is Thursday April 9th. The child friendly dinner of spaghetti, salad, bread, and fruit will begin at 5:00. The children are welcome to start dying eggs as soon as they are finished eating. You may bring your own eggs from home to dye and then take back home, or you may bring eggs to dye and then donate to stone soup, or you may dye eggs that have been purchased and donated for the event. Communion will take place down at the dinner and you may choose to bring your children back into McLean Hall if you wish them to be part of that. There will also be a new, interesting Maundy Thursday service at 6:45 that the children are invited to attend. This service will be short, but dynamic and probably interesting to the kids. Plan to attend!

For Maundy Thursday we need donations of eggs, egg dye, and volunteers. I will be setting up the egg dying stations at 4:00 pm. I have to work at 6:00 pm and thus will need adults to help with egg dying and clean up. Please come help set up as well if you are available.

Easter

Easter begins at FCC with the "Sunrise" Service at 7:00 am. Easter breakfast will be served from 7:30 to 10:30. The Folk Service starts at 8:45 am. The Celebration service with the activities for the children starts at 10:45. This year the children's activities will include Hot Cross Buns, the Flower Cross, and the Easter Egg Hunt. 

For Easter we need donations of plastic easter eggs (to the office or to me before Maundy Thursday), flowers for the cross brought to church on Easter Sunday, and VOLUNTEERS on Easter Sunday to help hide eggs, help decorate the cross, and help with the general mayhem. 

Thank you for making your way to the end of this posting. Feel free to comment or email with your RSVP for these events (knowing some of who is coming is always helpful), how you are able to help with donations or volunteer time, and YOUR CHILD"S T-SHIRT SIZE (before this Thursday evening).

Love to all of you,

Emily