Re-beginning of Awana at MFBC

October 14, 2020

After closing down Awana and most children's gatherings under the Covid threat in April, we finally got to the point where we felt like we could make a cautious re-beginning of Awana with proper distancing and precautions. Becky Ridgway had done a great job of keeping in touch with the children with transparent containers of candy or other objects for them to guess the numbers, and things they could do at home to keep in touch with the church program. Periodically, study materials or "keep-in-touch" materials were delivered to children's homes.

We gathered with spaced pairs of chairs and masks for our first opening ceremony for Awana since April. Elaine Ridgway started with a devotional in which the children hid three Bibles, and progressed to the message that we seek to hide God's Word in our hearts. Beautifully done. Then Becky Ridgway welcomed the children and their parents for this first session.

For this first meeting, the attendance of parents was required and masks were required along with careful social distancing. The parents signed them up for this year's Awana program.

It was good to get together with children and parents, and everything worked smoothly.

Becky presents an award to Ryan Johnson that would normally have been presented in the spring recognition service. It was good to present some awards and to try to encourage involvement in learning scriptures this year. Barbara Mewborn with grandson Lonnie at left.

Awana Store

The next item on the agenda was to let the Awana boys and girls visit the Awana Store, which we would have done in the spring except for Covid. They earn points for their scripture learning and various other items during the year and are able to redeem these points for items in the Awana Store. Influenced by Covid, as everything is, the store this year was set up with lots of space in the foyer of the church and everyone was reminded to maintain reasonable social distancing.

Getting to pick out prizes based on their accomplishments of the year is always exciting for the boys and girls.

Lonnie picks out prizes to add up to the total of his points while Grandmother Barbara looks on.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the store. We had almost our full leadership group present, and leaders were assigned bags for the boys and girls that couldn't be there so we could select a number of prizes to fit their number of points so that we could save a bag for each of them.

Awana, October 21

On October 21 we had our first week of regular Awana, if you can call anything in Covid time "regular". We divided into our regular classes. This photo is at snack time at the beginning, and that was they only time they could take their masks off. The seats are well separated, with a second seat to hold their materials and their boxes of crayons, pencils, etc. were placed under a seat and not shared with anyone else. Present at this time were Jackson, Narah, JJ, Jayda, Strong, and Hailey, with leader Brenda Speight.