Families, Children & Youth

All ages worship together in our weekend services, and we work at including all ages in each part of the service. Music is lively and heartfelt; we strive to use language that anyone can understand, children & youth are invited to participate in the life of the church by serving alongside the adults.

Please don’t feel children must be absolutely quiet and still, we know they may need to have a wriggle, a comment, a question, or a wander around!

There are two kinds of take-home activity packs available, one for PreSchool-Lower Primary, one for Upper Primary. Our welcomers will be very happy to get you a bag so they can start right away.

Your children are welcome to take part in the Lord’s Supper with you (there’s non-alcoholic grape juice available), just let the servers know what you’d prefer when they come to your family.

All our leaders have current Working With Children clearance through the Office of the Children’s Guardian, and every three years they participate in Safe Church Awareness training, approved by the National Council of Churches Australia.

Mother’s day craft

I found this clever craft on a Californian library website - it’s easy enough for little ones to make, but it’s classy enough for adults to enjoy either making it or receiving it. You need heavy paper or light card in green or brown (green makes it more like a bunch of flowers, brown makes it look like a tree), a pencil for tracing around Mum’s hand, child-safe scissors, lots of colourful hearts of different sizes (about 20 per hand), glue stick for attaching the hearts, strips of paper for joining the wrist so your creation can stand up, and a sticker or paper label printed with an encouraging message from the Bible for Mum.

Good Friday Craft

At Hat Head, we celebrated Good Friday and Jesus’ resurrection all in one service on Saturday evening. It was full to bursting, and adults and kids worked together to decorate the sanctuary wall by cutting out pre-printed letters (I used a chunky free font called VTC Bad Drip, printed on heavy black craft paper), and sticking them to the wall with Blu-tak. Looks effective, doesn’t it? We’ll leave them up til Pentecost.

Easter day craft

We did this one at Hat Head and also at South West Rocks, where there was a separate service celebrating Jesus’ resurrection. Kids and adults cut out the letters, pre-printed in the same chunky font, and decorated them with glue sticks and whatever they liked from an assortment of glitter, feathers, stickers and textas. The little crown was cut from the scraps, an inspired thought from one of the kids!