Summer Religious Education (RE) for Kindergarten through 5th Grade

Guest in the Classroom is an opportunity to learn more about the church in action. Members of the congregation are excited to share their interests with our children! 

Registration helps us plan supplies, safer group sizes, and indoor space.  Please complete this form for children who are Kindergarten through 5th Grade. Summer RE will follow the COVID guidelines set by the church board. You can view those guidelines at uubn.org. https://forms.gle/ihTs7EnLJ9kEuxmj9

Some Junior High and High Schoolers have asked about helping and we would love to have them with us. Let Terina ([email protected]) know if your 6th-12th grader is interested in being a Junior Teaching Assistant this summer. 

At every age, the foundation of Religious Education is the co-creation of a classroom community that reflects Unitarian Universalist values:

• affirming the inherent worth and dignity of each individual
• valuing the love that all kinds of families share
• searching for truth and meaning from many sources
• encouraging each person’s free and responsible exploration of big ideas
• treating one another with compassion and respect
• making choices that reflect our values
• listening to the still, small voice of our hearts
• harnessing our power to create a world with more love, more joy, and more justice

The great end in religious instruction, is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs; not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions, but to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their decision; not to burden memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought.  ~~William Ellery Channing

Child Dedication

 It takes a Unitarian Universalist Village to raise a Unitarian Universalist Child.

During a Child Dedication, the congregation pledges to partner with and support parents and families in the religious upbringing of the child. Child Dedications take place during Sunday worship services twice a year. During the 2020-2021 church year, Child Dedication Rituals will be held on December 6 and June 13. Infants and children of members and those on the path to membership at Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington-Normal may be dedicated.

Before the day of the Child Dedication, your family will meet with Rev. Rebecca and Terina. They will discuss the meaning and details of the ritual with you and will take some time to get to know you and your child better. 

If your family would like to participate in the Child Dedication, please contact Terina Carter, Director of Lifespan Religious Education, at 309.828.0235 or [email protected].

Whether we wish it so or not, our children are religious, spiritual beings. From within their own magical selves they know feelings, intuitions, and impulses. From the people, stories, songs, and media of their environs they hear religious words and messages and see religious symbols and images. From the experiences of their daily living they encounter religious events.

They see dry sticks sprout pulsing green leaves. They see the deer killed on the highway. They watch their teacher’s tummy grow round with new life, and bid farewell to their uncle. From the demands of their living and growing in the world they face situations that require from them a religious decision, response, or interpretation.

We cannot choose whether they will be religious, but we can choose how and to what extent we will support, guide, and celebrate this dimension of their nature.

– Rev. Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar, retired Unitarian Universalist minister and religious educator, author of The Gift of Faith: Tending the Spiritual Lives of Children

Coming of Age

Unitarian Universalist teenagers usually join their congregations with a special “Coming of Age” ceremony. This ceremony is preceded by a program helping them learn more about Unitarian Universalism and articulate their own beliefs. The Coming of Age ceremony usually features the youth reading their statements of personal belief (credo statements) to the congregation.