Hello Middle School CCD
Parents!
Myself and the three co-leaders,
Mike Krystofik, Cheryl Gies, & Michelle Beer are all excited about this
coming year and the two great programs we will be leading your children through
this coming year in preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation!
All sacraments are special
but Confirmation is special in one way because it completes the Sacraments of Christian
Initiation. Baptism and the Eucharist
are the other two. The Catechism of the
Catholic Church in paragraphs1302 through 1305 teaches the effects of Confirmation. The foundation of
all those effects is that Confirmation roots us more deeply with the Father as
a “Child of God”. Truly understanding and believing we are Children of God is an
important underlying foundational point we will be stressing all year. We will
be opening and closing many of the sessions with music videos that are
available on the Internet and one of my favorite songs is by Third Day and is
titled “Children of God”. I had the
opportunity to attend an outdoor concert this summer where Third Day performed
this song live and the songs words make a pretty power statement when you have 30,000+
people singing along with this song claiming “We are Children of God”.
We have a Blog (website)
setup for this class that will be used along with parent emails to keep parents,
sponsors, and students informed. The
Blog site can be found at mphmmsccd.blogspot.com
so share this site with your child’s sponsor or anyone else who is interested
in what is going on in the Middles School CCD class. Please bookmark this site
and check it out weekly to see the new information that is posted. This site is also mobile friendly so it can also
be viewed on a smart phone or tablet.
In the opening paragraph I
mentioned we are excited about the two programs we will be using this year to
guide us through this year of preparation for receiving the sacrament of Confirmation.
They are “DecisionPoint” by Matthew Kelly and the group at Dynamic Catholic and “TOB for Teens” by Jason
Evert and several other well-known teen chastity speakers. I would encourage
you to use the links in the prior sentence or the links on the right-hand side
of the class blog site to preview
the programs. Both of the programs have
short videos on the pages the links point to that introduce the programs. I am
confident you will see these two programs are much more dynamic and engaging
for the students (and the leaders for that matter) than the programs that have
been available to us in the past.
At this point in time, the
most important piece of information you can find on the blog site is the class calendar. Because we have changed from 1-1/2 hour class
sessions to 2 hours session (7:00pm – 9:00pm),
the students will not be meeting every week.
The class calendar, which is linked on the right-hand side of the main home page, contains the schedule
of days the students will be meeting in what was the library in St Mary’s
School. Parent sessions have also been added to this year’s schedule and these
dates can also be found on the class calendar.
The parent sessions will only last 1 hour from 7:00pm to 8:00pm. Sponsors are also invited and encouraged to
attend the parent sessions when they can.
There are also a few special dates included in the calendar you will
want to note.
The first session will be a
one hour parent only session on Wednesday, September, 10 from 7:00pm to
8:00pm. If you have not turned in
the registration form before that session, please bring the completed form with
you to this parent session. If you need
a registration form, please contact the Parish office.
I tried to be brief but there
is a lot of information I wanted to share with you before we kick-off the new
year. If you have any questions
regarding the content of this letter or anything else related to the Middle
School CCD classes, please contact me using the contact information I included in the email I sent to you.
God Bless!
Gary Lauderbaugh
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