Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
We are blessed to have completed our first year as Sunday School Directors and could not have done it without the amazing support of this community. We celebrated many successes this year and weathered challenges as well. We are grateful to our dedicated teachers, parents, and for the support of this community for our children, the future of this community and our faith!
Overall, this year has been an amazing journey of rebuilding our program and were delighted to get to know a core group of students that came consistently to Sunday School. We are so grateful for those dedicated parents, grandparents, and all adults who bring the children to our church, volunteer in our classrooms, and attend our youth events. Thank you.
We instituted a new curriculum this year that we feel worked well for our teachers, incorporating the wonderful Virtual Sunday School Videos that Demos and Father produce. These videos aligned with our curriculum of monthly themes, Sunday lessons, and service projects that connected our kids to one another and to the events and feast days of our liturgical calendar.
We even put on our own mini–Oratorical Festival that our youngest children participated in and they did an amazing job. We had a wonderful Christmas Pageant and our Lenten retreat was a huge success with about 30 kids participating! Partnering with our Philoptochos, Greek School, and GOYA, and through the generosity of our parish we completed 3 service projects: supporting 2 local food banks, re-stocking the Junior League of Rochester Diaper Bank, and collecting hygiene products to support Rochester City schools and the ministries of our neighbor congregation: Asbury First United Methodist. These successes built a great foundation going into next year!
Of course, we were not without our challenges, mainly low participation and the pandemic which have taken a toll on our children attending Sunday School. We are committed to continuing to pro-vide the religious education and youth ministry needed for our children to connect to our Orthodox Christian faith and to be active participants in the body of Christ., thank you!
We look forward to meeting many more smiling faces next fall in our classrooms. Our teachers work hard to prepare lessons and are excited to see their classroom full of students! This also means we need help from our adults in the community as well. We would love to see two teachers in every classroom next year, so that people can feel supported in their classrooms and have the help they need!
We hope everyone has an amazing summer and we hope to see you in church this summer as well! Please look out for emails and information for summer activities and the start of Sunday School dates! We are excited to see what the next year brings!
Finally, we gather inspiration to do this work and hope you will too from this verse from Luke Chapter 18 verse 16 “But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” We humbly strive to welcome and teach all children just as Jesus did, truly they teach us as much as we teach them. Thank you very much.
Yours in Christ,
Karina Onderdonk and Lauren Gashlin