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Dear BCA Parents of 4th through 7th graders:
We are thrilled to announce that Caleb Smith has become BCA's new Junior High Director! Caleb is a sophomore Pastoral Ministries major at Northwest University in Kirkland, and his roles at BCA will include being the primary communicator for our awesome 6th through 8th grade students, facilitator for both boys and girls groups, and will serve alongside Pastor Jared, Lexy and Chris as part of our True Life youth staff. He is an answer to our prayer and we're excited to have him on the team!
Caleb represents a capstone for a journey that our Family Life Ministries team began in Fall 2015. As a Family Life Ministry team, it is our expectation that every service, group, camp, event or hangout would do two things: put Jesus at the center, and be exciting enough that any of our students could invite their friends. This is our standard for every age - birth through college. Our motto for BCA Kids' is "Teaching kids to love Jesus for a lifetime," and our True Life motto is just like it - "Jesus. People. Church."
We say it, and we believe it.
It was Fall 2015 that we expanded our True Life ministry to try to reach and support students at the time that they are statistically most likely to walk away from the faith - the college years. We knew it would be a stretch for our current team, but we felt the conviction that Christ was calling us to go for it. Going out on this limb required us to adjust some energy from our younger ages to the older ages, but we began experiencing the fruits of our efforts right away. Teemed with our Ministry College program, our college-aged group grew, as did our high school leadership team, but less time was available for our younger students. We knew we needed to strengthen our core.
Our first step was to go a bit younger and bring on Rylan Faucett to lead our elementary ministry in July 2016. Bringing Rylan on to work full time with our amazing children's team was a stretch for BCA, but it began to pay immediate dividends. He brings enthusiasm that matched our expectations! Our next step was to start to make plans to combine our 5/6 program with our 7/8 program. We felt like our students would benefit from the enthusiasm of "critical mass" and appropriate age-level teaching. So we made that adjustment, and we began to see growth, but finding the "right" leader took some time. We also realized throughout the process, that most other churches in the area were structuring their camps and events in elementary through 5th grade. We decided to make that change ourselves! On promotion weekend 2017 (June 10/11), BCA elementary kids will extend up through 5th grade with Rylan, and 6th-8th grade will meet on Wednesdays and weekends with Caleb!
I'm grateful and proud to be able to say that BCA is offering our best for our children - from nursery to college! If you have not yet met your student's leader, please go out of your way to get to know them, serve with them, and introduce your friends to them - they care about you and your students!
We will have a meet-and-greet with Pastor Jared, Caleb, Lexy, Rylan and a few other members of our Family Life team on June 4th at 12:22pm in the Attic. We'd love to have you stop by!
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here.
We look forward to helping your student focus on Jesus, people and church for a lifetime!
Pastor John
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