Revitalizing & Rethinking Our First Day Schools

All of our First Day School efforts work to set the stage for our children’s convincement. We want to offer them the living fire of our Quaker faith, but how best to do that? This week, we’ll take a hard look at the resources and practices that can make the First Day School model work better for us and even look beyond it to some innovative alternatives or supplements. All the while, we’ll weave in practical advancement and outreach strategies to help attract new families to your meetings. These issues are important for meetings of any size and indeed are a crucial part of keeping Quakerism vibrant for decades to come.

As the Christian Education Coordinator for NEYM, I often see Quaker Meetings caught in what seems like an impossible bind. They need to attract new families but they probably won’t stay without a First Day School. They can’t start a First Day School without children and for that they need to attract families. Around and around it goes! The Advancement and Outreach effort and the Religious Education conversation have gone along without much reference to each other. I think the resolution to this dilemma is to begin to work on both problems at the same time. There are no magic answers but there are good strategies and we need to get good at using them!

We’ll begin each day with an experiential worship exercise and about 30 minutes of worship. Most days, we’ll have a brief presentation to introduce materials or frame a topic and then take time to grapple, reflect, brainstorm, and try things out. I’ll bring what I consider a tote bag filled with RE Essentials to have on hand while you wait for the first family and we’ll practice creating lessons for various configurations of ages in possible first families. We’ll look at materials for longer units once your First Day School begins to grow that are substantive, fun, and fairly easy to teach. I want to impart and empower a robust sense of our unique strengths as Quaker religious educators; one is that we teach worship. Our ability to explore the inner experience of centering, prayer, and worship with our children sets us apart from almost all other Sunday School programs.

Advancement and Outreach will receive about one-fifth of our time. We’ll brainstorm creative ways to get the word out about your Meeting and how to communicate who you are and what you have to offer to new attenders. We’ll think about the elements of an effective “welcome” for your Meeting. Please check out the FGC Advancement and Outreach section on the fgcquaker.org website. You’ll find wonderful articles that will be a jumping off point for us.

We’ll grapple with a topic crucial for meetings of any size—how to help families make Quaker Meeting a priority in their busy lives. For this we may need to take a creative look beyond the Sunday School model of “one hour, once a week” which originated in the 1850’s. It’s time to try out some new ways to help Quaker families dig in and grow in their Quaker faith. We want them to keep the conversation going all week long at home. We’ll explore practical ways to make this happen—family worship, family service projects, a Young Quakers Lending Library, parent conversations, and more. I’ll bring some case studies from New England Yearly Meeting.

This workshop is designed for First Day School teachers and Friends carrying a concern to build or enliven a children’s religious education program especially those from small meetings. I hope our workshop will begin a sustained, supportive, and creative conversation about revitalizing Quaker meetings of all sizes. I look forward to learning from the participants, too. Bring examples of what has worked for your meeting or another meeting with which you are familiar to enrich our time together.