by Robin Mitzcavitch, Director of Religious Exploration

Last Friday night I met with the Religious Exploration Team to put on a Welcome Back Families event . It was extraordinary!

In the room, there was love.  It wasn’t because of the pizza and the popsicles!  It was love for our community gathering together.

The twenty children met each other with excitement and smiles. The teens showed up to help with the little ones. The legos were taken out of the bins and the floor was filled with builders. Children felt at home in their surroundings.

Parents and caregivers greeted one another with renewed familiarity.. We were honored that our new ministerial intern Emily came to meet our attending families.

After a while, the children split off with the teens and I sat down with parents and we chatted. It was a fairly large group, but it felt intimate and light-hearted and familiar. We heard about each other’s excellent adventures over the summer and shared laughs and interest. The RE team and I then shared from our hearts what Religious Exploration meant to us. The key elements that ran through all of our descriptions were love, respect, acceptance, safe space, and discovery. 

Yes, we went through all the pertinent info about our program, our Safe Church Policies, our calendar, and individual classes.  But truly, we were just beginning with love: for our community and the programs we strive to deliver, and the connections we hope to nourish.

At the end of the evening, a dad of a younger child came up to me privately and told me how he really never knew the scope of what went into the Religious Exploration program and how he was very moved by the detail in which we honor our children.  At the end of the evening we had parents asking to be trained in our extra programming like Our Whole Lives (OWL) -Human Sexuality Education taught across the lifespan. At the end, the RE team who worked together to put everything together with the food and the set-up, cleared up and we went on our way. At the end, I felt blessed to be a part of our community.  We began with love.

AND we begin our RE programming on September 27th at 10am and I  can’t wait to meet all the families again…with love.

With Happy Anticipation,

Robin