Religious Ed/CCD fees

Our kids go to Sunday School and it's free. Never heard of paying for church classes before. :confused3 We're Mennonite.
 
Wow, reading these costs, its a good thing I'm Protestant.....I couldn't afford to be Catholic or Jewish! :goodvibes

Sunday School (about an hour per week) at our Methodist church is from September through May for all ages. If we have enough kids around 7th grade who are interested, Confirmation class may be offered as well. There is no charge. An offering is taken, which usually is earmarked for some mission project that would of special interest to young people. Sunday School budget comes out of our general church budget. And that includes Bibles that are given to each child in 4th grade.


Yup this.
 
Just curious, for those of you who seem to frown on paying for religious education (and I'm sure not trying to put down all of the Catholics and Jews...;)), but how many kids are in your programs? Our church (1 of 3 Catholic churches) in our small town has over 500 children in CCD. Our parish has enough to pay for without funding that totally out of the weekly collections.

The Catholic church is HUGE - (heck, they have their own city!). It's expensive.
 
We are Lutheran.

We have a Wed night program for gr K-5. The kids do a service project, play games, and eat pizza. We charge $35 for the year, which only offsets the cost... It certainly does not cover the full cost of supplies & pizza.

Our Jr Hi students attend Confirmation class (gr 6-8). The cost is $40/ yr. it includes their Confirmation Bible, and helps pay the rent for the space we use across the street. We have 90 kids in Confirmation. The church had plans to build an extension, but when the economy tanked, church made a prudent choice to rent a space in a strip center across the street. Confirmation is the main purpose of this extra room and the rent/utilities is over $1000/mo. Again the $40/yr per student is only a drop in the bucket to help cover expenses. I can promise the church is not making money off of this!

While it is great that some denominations do not have fees, I don't feel it's fair to look down on denominations that need to charge. Supplies x 90 kids can get pricey and somehow those things need to be purchased no matter how prudent/frugal a program is.

VBS is often free or nearly free because many churches see it as community outreach or a way to bring new members to a church. My kids have attended free VBS with friends, and they often have a major come-to-our-church-vibe by the end of it. I've spoken to many VBS leaders who admit that VBS is more about recruiting new church members than it is about educating current church members. So of course free is the way to be... More butts in the seat!

Whereas, classes, teaching children is more about educating current members. My kids would certainly invite a friend to a free fellowship event with games, etc., but a class learning about the Old Testament or the history of the Lutheran church is less likely to "bring a friend" and more that you attend with the goal of being confirmed at the end of your education. It's a different scenario than a free fun vbs.
 


Just curious, for those of you who seem to frown on paying for religious education (and I'm sure not trying to put down all of the Catholics and Jews...;)), but how many kids are in your programs? Our church (1 of 3 Catholic churches) in our small town has over 500 children in CCD. Our parish has enough to pay for without funding that totally out of the weekly collections.

The Catholic church is HUGE - (heck, they have their own city!). It's expensive.

I don't get your reasoning. So you have 500 kids then you have families with these kids just like a church that has 100 kids. The number of kids correlates to the number of families so you have more families contributing than a church with 100 kids. It is just what your church decides to spend it's money on.
 
This is eye opening for me as a CE director. Our denomination doesn't charge for religious education; I didn't realize others did. Ours is funded by the general church fund, as is adult ed and teen programming. (Children, youth and adults each have one paid staff member {adult=the pastor}. The rest is volunteer staff.)

I, too, have never heard of charging people for teaching kids in church...
Not in the Lutheran church, nor the Baptist...

I am amazed that the catholic church charges parents to teach their children about the Bible. I can see a nominal fee to pay for the books, maybe. I was raised Lutheran and attend a nondenominational church. in the Lutheran church we didn't pay for confirmation classes.

we did pay tuition to attend the private school, but that was for academics.
 
Just curious, for those of you who seem to frown on paying for religious education (and I'm sure not trying to put down all of the Catholics and Jews...;)), but how many kids are in your programs? Our church (1 of 3 Catholic churches) in our small town has over 500 children in CCD. Our parish has enough to pay for without funding that totally out of the weekly collections.

The Catholic church is HUGE - (heck, they have their own city!). It's expensive.

WE are Baptist, WE are a medium one and probably are around 500 give or take and same for vacation bible school. Our Sunday school runs year round, there is never a charge, or for vacation bible school. this is just a strange concept to me.

Then again I have many friends who are Catholic and even they joke about how you can "buy" your way into anything. I had a friend that "gave" her way into an annulment. lol

Also, not knocking the Catholic religion, we all have our oddities. I am Baptist, we don't do Lent, why? because they took away everything form us, nothing to give up. ;)
 


Just curious, for those of you who seem to frown on paying for religious education (and I'm sure not trying to put down all of the Catholics and Jews...;)), but how many kids are in your programs? Our church (1 of 3 Catholic churches) in our small town has over 500 children in CCD. Our parish has enough to pay for without funding that totally out of the weekly collections.

The Catholic church is HUGE - (heck, they have their own city!). It's expensive.

Our church seats over 7,000 per service- we have 2 services on Sunday mornings and we're pretty full.
I'd guess membership is upwards of 15,000 people.
Children's Ministry is separated into those under age 3, pre-school, grades K - 3, 4 & 5, 6 - 8, and 9 - 12.
We run early church concurrent with early Sunday school, and late church concurrent with late Sunday school.
9:15 am and 11 am.

There is no cost for Sunday School, child care during church events,
Sunday night AWANA or iTruths or Wednesday night World Explorers,
or the Friday evening 5th Quarter activities that are offered FREE to any high school age youth in our city
( to help provide fun, God-pleasing activities to replace the alcohol and other negative party behaviors that often follow high school football games- http://5thquarterva.com/ ).

Actually ALL of these are free to members and to the public.
The only youth activities that are not free would be overseas mission trips that the high school youth go on once a year(Guatemala).

All our Christian education programs are run by a mix of paid church staff and volunteers working together.
And yes, we are Baptist...
 
Just curious, for those of you who seem to frown on paying for religious education (and I'm sure not trying to put down all of the Catholics and Jews...;)), but how many kids are in your programs? Our church (1 of 3 Catholic churches) in our small town has over 500 children in CCD. Our parish has enough to pay for without funding that totally out of the weekly collections.

The Catholic church is HUGE - (heck, they have their own city!). It's expensive.

We only have about 600 member families, and about 300 kids in our RE program. Its free - with the exception of the trip the Youth Group takes which then fundraise for.

We pay for two ministers, a musical director, an RE director, a Youth Group director, two RE aids, a mortgage over a million dollars for the sanctuary expansion, donate almost six figures to service organizations - without tithing or charging for RE.

Don't kid yourself - the Catholic Church is one of the world's wealthiest organizations. Vatican City can run forever just off the interest on its investments - and if that were to run out, they could sell some art.
 

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