If our head is on straight (sometimes a tall task in itself), is there anything more important to us than our kids.
River of Joy kids preparing and packaging meals at Feed My Starving Children.
We bring children into this world with love and we hope that they will send us out of this world in the same way. Between these passages of life and death, we do our best to raise them, support them, and share what we have learned in our own life journey.
As a community of faith, there is nothing more important than passing faith on from generation to generation. Our hope at River of Joy, is that our children would learn to have faith in community.
First, our desire is that our kids would have a community where their personal faith is nourished, developed, and tended by the whole of the community. We treat each other’s children like they are our own. As a community, we love them. We teach them. We learn from them. We feel responsible for them. We make every effort to keep them in the middle of our community life; be it while we serve together or while we gather to worship. We do not break them out in age appropriate classes that are separated from the rest of the community. We believe that the oldest among us can learn from the youngest and we strive to be a learning community. Together.
Secondly, we strive to teach our children the fundamental truth that people must have healthy community in order to have a healthy world. We want our kids to have faith in community itself. Our desire is that our children see in us a group of people who are informed and enlivened by Christ to live a deeper life with one another. We strive to model this depth of life in order that our children carry it into the world that they will someday be charged with leading and shaping.
