Sidewalk Sunday School
Since I’ve been here for awhile — and made a few friends — I guess it is safe to REALLY introduce myself. I am a teacher, a writer and a children’s evangelist. Supported by a team of truly awesome people I teach Sunday School every Saturday in one of Vegas’s poorest, most transient inner city neighborhoods.
This is our church. It is on wheels. October through May we take it to a local elementary school on Saturdays for worship. Each week we have a few new kids. Each week a few kids move away — the neighborhood is highly transient — however, some kids have been attending Sidewalk services for our entire five years.
These are our “pews” — two squares of carpet rolled out onto the asphalt. The children sit here for the lessons.
Where we roll out the carpet is always dictated by the weather — in the sun when its cold, in the shade when its hot, and not at all when it rains. The school has an outdoor lunch shelter we use when it rains, but unfortunately it is quite small and sometimes the kids really have to cuddle to fit eveyone in.
During the summer months when it is too hot to gather the children together and sit them on the ground, we have “splash” events where we all get together once every few weeks and try to drown each other in fun.
If you have now been inspired to start a Sidewalk Sunday School [patented] program in your church, please contact our Director, Billie Fidlin. Her email is: billie@desertsw.org
Be sure to put Sidewalk Sunday School (SSS) in the header, and tell her Charlene sent you.
Sidewalk Sunday School, God Rocks, religion,
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 7:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
July 22nd, 2006 at 8:08 am
What an awesome outreach ministry to the children!!
July 22nd, 2006 at 8:57 am
Thank you for coming by my blog.
You have a dynomite ministry going here.
God bless!
July 22nd, 2006 at 9:20 am
Way to go!! Sounds like a great ministry for those kids. They need it!! Keep it up!!
July 22nd, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Wow! What an awesome ministry!!!
July 23rd, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Realy awesome… Keep going… All the best for ur ministry reach gr8er heights in life.
July 24th, 2006 at 1:54 am
I’ve never heard of this! What a good idea! Thanks for stopping by my blog.
July 24th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Hi Charlene, I don’t know anything about rock, but do you mind if I roll quietly in the corner. Q
July 24th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Q —
We have rules at Sidewalk. One of them is that you must sit up — so, by all means, cuddle in the corner, but remain in an upright position ….
On the other hand, the adults are way busy at Sidewalk and they don’t get much of a change to sit down …. We have lessons to teach, songs to sing, games or crafts to organize, food and prizes to distribute (everyone gets a prize for participating in the game; game winners get applause as their individual reward).
Why don’t you stop by on a day we have break dancing contests. There’s a 5 year old boy that comes to our site who blows all competition away — if you can do it, he can do it ten times cuter.
July 24th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
That is absolutely THE most awesome idea I have EVER heard of! And I live just outside of DC, but I’ve never heard of a traveling Sunday School for the kids! What GREAT work you do!!! AMEN!!!
July 25th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
What a wonderful idea – bring the church to the people and not the other way around. Very cool 🙂
July 26th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Thank you for visiting my blog today and commenting. This is such an incredible ministry. Thank you for sharing. I will definitely be emailing your director to see how we can help. I would love to see if we can start one over here, or something similar. I’m not sure if you looked around my blog at all. I recently posted a question if anyone knew how I could minister to some of the people who are well off in our neighborhood. Someone mentioned to my beloved that we should just sit in front of our house singing and having our normal family worship, and you’d be surprised how the children are sort of just drawn to you. Sorry, I didn’t realize this got pretty long. Well, thank you for sharing such an awesome ministry. Keep up the great work. I also teach SS. We go to church on Saturday, but I would love to be able to do this after church.