Kids

At Riverside we have one goal when it comes to our kids- we want them to go home feeling like they were blessed by us. We could focus on a lot of different things when it comes to kids. We could try to pump them full of Bible knowledge or we could train them on how to behave properly in church. There’s nothing wrong with either of these approaches- it’s just not what we choose to focus on at Riverside.  At Riverside we feel like if the kids learn something then that’s fantastic, but our number one goal is to show them the love of Jesus and to help them believe  there’s an adult out there who cares about them and believes in them and is glad they came to church. We've got about an hour to with your kids in a given week and we just can't accomplish everything that it would be totally awesome if we could accomplish so we focus specifically on loving, accepting and forgiving your kids as necessary. Yes, we still teach them the Bible stories but if they're squirmy and can't sit still and don't seem to be learning as much as we'd like then we revert to our primary objective- love, accept and forgive.

Why do we take this approach? Because a person who has grown up in church can always study the Bible as an adult to gain the knowledge they missed out on as a child in Sunday school but it’s really tough to make an adult believe that God cares about them deeply if they didn’t experience that (or God forbid experience the opposite) from the adults at the church they grew up in.