A year-round weekly ministry since 2020, Storytime in the Park continues to serve our community and church families and children. Meeting indoors at ASC in the colder or inclement weather, our weekly gathering offers a quality children's story, a parallel craft, and a snack with juice. We begin and end with playtime, either on the park playground, or indoors in our church nurseries.
Storytime offers lots of opportunities to get to know folks as we craft together with the kids and enjoy playtime. Kids play while parents talk and often begin friendships. Storytime is also attended by local grandparents caring for their grandchildren, as well as a few nannies providing individualized care for a child at their home.
This past winter, each Storytime parent was offered a photo for a personal wall cubby in the Children's Wing hallway as a place to store their coats/jackets and personal belongings while they visit. This was a hit, and parents began asking for their child’s photo to be taken. The Storytime season is one to five years for parents, who typically come for just a few years before their child starts preschool or Kindergarten.
Holidays also provide a time for enthusiasm and joy, and even more outreach. Storytime offered Shine Your Light (SYL) on Halloween Day and each child received an invite to church along with a SYL bag of goodies. The week before Christmas, we read Christmas stories but saved the best for last: the birth of Jesus in a sweet story of The Nativity, followed by an invitation to The Gingerbread Bash family event. The church also offered a Valentine Storytime, complete with Valentine bags for each child, a “Jesus Loves You” Valentine card, and of course treats. The children enjoyed a Valentine exchange and also received a VBS invitation.
The families attending are a large mix of diversity and lifestyles. We have stay-at-home, homeschooling, and working moms; a preschool teacher, a dad who works evenings and Sundays, grandparents, and nannies. We have met many families of various cultures and ethnicities in the park, especially each season a handful of Spanish-speaking families. Four of these have come weekly to Storytime at the church over the winter. As mentioned above, one is a single father who attended our 5 p.m. Christmas Eve service with his mother and child. One is a mom married to an American husband who does not drive, so she Ubers to Storytime, and other moms are beginning to pick her up. Another is a Spanish nanny caring for a toddler, but she herself has teens at home. She recently invited a Spanish friend with a little one and they have come the last two weeks.
These families are attending our events, and occasionally our services. With continued relationship and invitation, my prayer is that more will come to know Jesus, be encouraged in their faith, and begin attending church. One mom from Ukraine comes weekly and has her own story:
Encouraging Others in their Faith
We met a mom from Ukraine at Storytime in Cloverdale Park. She has a school-age daughter in Kindergarten, and a one-year-old baby. She shared that her and her husband won a lottery for a green card to come to the US a bit over two years ago. They left everything including family, jobs, and culture. She commented on how everything is so different in the U.S. Her husband took a job as a truck driver (even though he worked in finance in Ukraine) and is away for holidays, days and nights, and she is often alone during her baby’s first year. She stated she is exhausted. She began coming each week to Storytime, and when the weather turned cold, she began coming to the church each Thursday. After about a month of coming indoors, I invited her to come to church as she was leaving Storytime. She was silent and left as normal. I wondered why I received a “deer in the headlights” look.
Several weeks later, she was the first to arrive, and we had a few minutes to talk. She told me that I had encouraged her to enter back into her faith. She shared she found a Christian Ukrainian Orthodox church in Manassas, and that it brought her back to her childhood faith when she used to attend weekly with her mother. She also shared that the friendship there has been wonderful for her, especially since they are all from Ukraine. And, it’s been a wonderful connection for her. She stated she loves bringing her baby to Storytime.
All Saints’ friends can visit Storytime any time, either reading, helping with crafts, talking to parents, or even pushing a child on a swing. We just ask you to take our Protecting God’s Children class and contact Tara first at tpedersen@allsaintswoodbridge.org .