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...