Pastoral couple Jonathan & Rachel Vaughan explain how they work with other churches
The junior demographic of Cardinet church has changed considerably since we first arrived. A baby boom (eight in the last four years!) and the children getting older led us to rethink our children’s activities (which had been an all-age Sunday school). The small basement room is now used for crèche and preschool children, and the collégiens (11-15s) and lycéens (15-18s) stay in the service. The preachers make more use of PowerPoint and prepare a question sheet for the teenagers to fill in, making it easier for them to follow the sermon.
We feel it’s important that the collégiens and lycéens have some time which is specifically for children their age. For this, we are fortunate to have links with other nearby evangelical churches who, like us, have a small number of teenagers. With help from L’Eglise des Ternes and the Perspectives church at Clichy, we run a collégiens group once a month, which our daughters Leah and Stephanie attend, along with children from three other churches. We play games, spend time looking at the Bible together, and eat together. Some of the kids invited non-Christian friends to a recent film evening.
The lycéens from Cardinet (including our daughters Naomi and Zoe) take part in an older youth group shared by several churches, where they do similar fun activities and learn to lead Bible studies themselves (some are involved in GBL, the sixth-form Christian Unions).Valuable friendships have been formed, as can be seen when one from the group invites all the others to their baptism.
Please pray for our young people, that they would grow in their faith and live distinctively for Christ, daring to go against the flow and sharing the hope of the gospel with their schoolfriends.
