Epworth UMC tries to connect more families to church

Epworth United Methodist Church in Elgin launched a new worship service last Sunday with the lofty goals of attracting families with young children, providing quality time for families and speaking to worshipers of all age levels.

Dubbed "Connections," the program is all about connecting on a number of different levels.

"The Outreach Committee proposed that we have a new worship service that would not only be kid-friendly but also multi-generational," said the Rev. David Newhouse, pastor at the Elgin church. "It's also interactive, which is somewhat unusual."

Parents and children break off into family units for hands-on interaction, often inviting singles or couples without children to join them for an activity.

At a recent pre-launch Connections service, the theme was storytelling. Families heard about Old Testament patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah and God's promises to them and the generations who would follow them.

"During the interactive time, we invited grandparents or parents to tell stories of experiences in their family that they treasure and that they think would be important to pass along to the next generation," Newhouse said.

Last Sunday's big launch focused on a passage from Romans that lists behaviors appropriate for a Christian. Families spent 10 minutes or so developing recipes for Christian family living and writing them on recipe cards.

Newhouse said an interactive event will be planned for each week, and the 45-minute service may also involve skits, movie clips and movement around the worship space. Many of the songs have hand motions, including some liturgy, and there's no formal sermon - only teaching times of about five minutes.

With a 10:30 a.m. start time, Connections joins Epworth's morning lineup between the 8:15 a.m. traditional worship and 11:30 a.m. praise service. Together, they draw about 225 weekly attenders, but the congregation hopes to see a healthy increase with the introduction of the new service.

In order to get the word out, Epworth members made more than 13,700 phone calls to area homes. "It was a very soft outreach program that simply asked every household that we reached if they were active in another faith community," Newhouse said.

If they were, Epworth politely ended the call. If not, callers asked if the families were open to receiving information about Connections and other ministries at the church, off Highland Avenue and Randall Road. Newhouse said the church got well over 200 positive responses and continued developing these relationships with postcards and follow-up phone calls.

Of course, he's hoping to meet them all in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning real soon.

New pastor at Cary church: Having lived his childhood on a foreign mission field, the Rev. John Cunningham brings a special ministry perspective to his new post as senior pastor at Cary's St. Barnabas Lutheran Church.

Cunningham was a Lutheran missionary kid in Japan whose parents had met as toddler "MKs" on the field in India. Eventually, Cunningham's paternal grandparents went on to minister in Tanzania, his maternal grandparents continued in India, and his own parents moved to Japan after the wedding and World War II.

"Dad went from fighting in the Pacific to being a missionary there," Cunningham said. "They ended up staying for 39 years."

So as a pastor in the American Midwest, Cunningham said he is open to interfaith dialogue and tries to keep a global perspective as well as a local community focus.

"I like to be in touch with what's going on in other congregations and in the community," he said. On the issue of hunger, for example, he likes to promote not only the local food pantry but also world hunger appeals.

He comes to St. Barnabas, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, from Salem Lutheran Church in Rockford and, previous to that, other churches in northern Illinois. In the early 1970s, Cunningham interned at Bethlehem Lutheran in Elgin.

"Every place I've served has been quite different, and that's been very exciting," he said. "Two congregations celebrated their 100th anniversary while we were there, and another was just a year old."

The Cary church, located at 8901 Cary-Algonquin Road, will install its new pastor this Sunday at 3 p.m., and the public is invited to attend.

Cunningham and his wife, Lanet, a Geneva native, met as students at Augustana College, Rock Island, and have two grown daughters. The pastor said he enjoys the welcome they've received in Cary but still has a Rockford address.

He said the economy has something to do with that: "We're planning to move as soon as we can sell our home."

Send in your Christmas news: Oops, how did we get to the holiday season again already? And me, without even a dent yet in my Christmas shopping list.

But here we are, at the brink of Thanksgiving with lots of plans for the coming month. If you want us all to know about your congregation's Christmas concert, outreach or other special event, please email me at cmchojnacki@yahoo.com, and I'll use what I can in December columns.

The sooner I can get your Christmas news, the better, and that'll give me one more thing to be thankful for this season. Last call will be on Monday, Dec. 8.