Rally Day!

This past Sunday was Rally Day and our Children’s Church kick-off. It was one busy day for me let me tell you. The week leading up to this Sunday was busy as well.

The day began with last minuet preparations and then Children's Church. Children's Church is basically Sunday School that takes place during the service. The children got to meet their teachers, sings songs, and have a snack. I felt slightly frazzled and did a lot of running around getting snacks, pouring juice cups, and making sure the teachers had everything they needed but it seemed to go well.

After church was Rally Day. Each year Our Redeemer Lutheran Church (ORLC) has Rally Day which is a day where every sub organization or activity that happens at ORLC gets to provide shameless publicity for their events. Each group sets up posters to publicize what they have to offer ORLC and in return the congregation gets to look at each one and figure out what they as members have to offer each group.

I, myself, was responsible for creating five different posters. Just by looking around the room it wasn’t too difficult to figure out which were the ones I made as they all followed a similar format with color coded backing paper.

In addition to having the groups publicize our congregation made it into a servant event as the members packaged “hygiene kits” to be donated to the Brother Francis Shelter. So how was this done? Well at each poster there was an item to be included in the hygiene kit; toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, wash cloth, deodorant, hairbrush, comb etc. In order to make a complete kit one would first pick up a ziplock bag and then proceed to visit  all the stations. This ensures that people were able to see each poster and allows for a service project to be done in the process. :)

Generational connections each member helped with the service project.

 All members young and old alike were able to participate in this service project and I think they had a lot of fun too. One thing that really helped me was that everyone wore a name tag. We are not a "name tag" congregation like my fieldwork church or other congregations, but on Rally Day everyone got a name tag. This was helpful for me because some people, I know them, I see them each week, but we were only formally introduced once, unfortunately I am not that good at remembering as it takes three, four, eight times for it to stick so this was very helpful to me.

We had a great turn-out

fellowship

 Of course what's a Lutheran gathering without food? What's the saying "Where two or three Lutheran's are gathered there will be food?" Just kidding. But there was donuts, muffins, fruit, coffee, and juice provided and as one can imagine lots of fellowship.

Existing members got to talk with one another and new members got to connect with old. It was great for me too because I got to meet A LOT of people. It's interesting because I saw several people who I'm told have attended ORLC for a long time but I had never seen before. In Alaska people are gone for the summer and fall is hunting so several "new" people I met were actually regular attenders.

After Rally Day I was invited over to some congregation member's home for a brunch. We watched football and they shared with me some great family fishing videos and pictures. It was a good time.

By the time I left it was around 4:00pm and I was exhausted. I went home to take an afternoon "nap" which turned into me sleeping around the clock until 10:00am Monday morning which was the best thing ever. All in all it was a very fun and good day and now i'm onto my next adventures; confirmation lessons, Fall Festival planning, and High School Lock-in planning. Never a dull moment :)