Children’s Message Rally Day—September 11, 2005

What a great day today is!! Although I love summer, I always look forward to this time of year when everything gets going again. So much is going on! We have the start of Sunday School today, plus the rally day picnic. For the whole month of September, we are asking the children and anyone else to save their quarters for our French” quarter drive for Hurricane Katrina Relief efforts. In October we have the all church get away weekend and the start of Qabats, plus much, MUCH more! It is an exciting time of year!

Yesterday, I was here at church leading orientation for all of our Sunday School teachers, and let me tell you, they are a GREAT group! They all told me how excited they were to be teaching all of you. In just a few minutes, you will all go down and meet your teachers. Next week, we will commission our teachers during this time in worship. Commissioning our teachers is when we take time in worship to ask the teachers to do their best to care for you all on behalf of the whole congregation. We also pray for them in their important work.

I was thinking about that yesterday, and I thought that maybe it would be neat to kind of commission our children, too.

The Children’s Ministry committee worked a lot last spring and over the summer to come up with some guiding words for children’s ministry—words that describe how we hope our children will be, so suing these words, “the 5 C’s”, I thought we could do something kind of like a commissioning for you. When I ask you a question, you can answer with, “We will”.
Will you be Cooperative with teachers and peers?
Will you be Careful with the bodies, feelings and resources of yourselves and others?
Will you be Considerate of All God’s children?
Will you be Contributing by sharing your gifts by participating in class?
Will you be Curious and willing to lean new things?


Let’s pray:
Loving God,
Be with us this year in Sunday school,
Help us to learn the stories of our faith,
And strengthen our friendships.
Amen.

Hurricane Katrina Children's sermon

Children’s Message
Sunday, September 4, 2005
French Quarters

Well, friends, I need to call on you, my best mission fund raisers with a new challenge.

If you watched the news at all this week, I bet that you were as sad as I was as you heard about all of the destruction that Hurricane Katrina caused in the states around the Gulf of Mexico this week. And just like last time, as soon as it happened, I started to wonder what our church might be doing to help. I got some phone calls and e-mails from families wondering how we might work together to help the people in New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, and parts of Mississippi and Alabama and Florida.

I checked with church world services (the people who we did all of our health kits through after the tsunami) to see if they needed health kits for the hurricane, but what I found out is that this time, money is really what will be the most helpful.

And I knew that we could bring in money, and I hope that everyone at Third Presbyterian Church is able to contribute a little bit of money, but I wanted to make a special challenge for the kids. So I thought. Now I have been to New Orleans a few times, and it is a beautiful, wonderful city, so I thought about New Orleans, and the wonderful things about it—the music, the food, the French quarter—hey, the most famous, historic part of the city of New Orleans is called the French quarter! Maybe if we collected quarters, it would be a way to be thinking of New Orleans while we did it, so that, my friends, is what we are going to do.

Get out your piggy banks, take back those cans in the garage, look under all your couch cushions, and bring as many quarters as you can find into church during the month of September. We will send all the money that we collect to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, and they will use it to help their partners to help out in New Orleans, and all of the other places in that region that were hit by the hurricane.

Let’s pray:
Loving God,
Please be with the people affected by Hurricane Katrina
Be with those who have lost special people
Be with those who have lost special possessions
Be with those who are trying to help others out,
And help us to do the same.
Amen.