How does your church celebrate your students' graduations? Maybe you celebrate your students' final graduation from high school, or have a ceremony to prepare your students for "leveling up" to the next grade of children's ministry or youth group. Do you have any special traditions? Do you prepare any gifts at any particular age, such as bibles, laundry baskets of university dorm supplies, or special journals / quilts / books? Do you have a special dedication time during your worship services, a Sunday school lesson, or during youth group gatehrings? We love to support our young people as they learn and grow, and we'd love to see how different church communities are able to do this. Thanks in advance for sharing!
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For each of our Grade 8 & 12 graduates, we have parents submit a grad photo of their child that we mount in the centre of a plain white poster-board so that there are wide margins around the photo. For two Sundays in June, we have these out on a display where the congregation can write notes of congratulations, encouragement and blessing. After those two weeks, we present the card and a devotional to the students on the stage as part of morning worship. It has been an intentional practice that the congregation loves to partake in!
In our WonderKids (Sunday School) program, we celebrate the season of transition between going to WonderKids and being in church for the whole service. We present the grade 5 students with a devotional in WonderKids and share a Bible verse selected for them by their teachers. Many of our grade 6 students go on to be WonderKids helpers to continue that relationship - it has been beautiful to see!
In the youth leaders of our high school youth ministry would hold a catered dinner for the high school graduates and then we have a discussion time on life after high school. This is a great time where the graduates can ask any thing they want. Questions range from how to find a good church community to how do I do laundry.
We have also held in the past cooking lessons for the grads that would be leaving home. We called it dinner with seniors. We would gather the ingredients for the dinner and the grads would prepare the meal under the supervision of a parent would use to work in the restaurant industry and we would then have dinner together. It was a time of getting to know the grads better and build the relationships with them. It was a six week event and at the end of it we gave each of them a cutting board ( made by the cadets) and a knife for them to remember and prepare their own meals.
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