Full Week Faith

Full Week Faith is a framework for equipping families for faith development throughout the week, far beyond the hour on Sunday morning when congregations are accustomed to reaching families. Developed by Karen Bellavance-Grace during her 2012 Fahs Fellowship at Meadville-Lombard Theological School, Full Week Faith draws from interfaith conversations about the changing state of religious education to present a model for family ministry in the 21st century.The following points summarize the model.

What is Full Week Faith?

  • Full Week Faith is not a specific program. It is an ethos, a framework, a way of doing family ministry.

  • Full Week Faith upholds the family as the primary religious educators of children, recognizing that religious educators, teachers, and ministers play a secondary role.

  • Congregations that are "doing Full Week Faith” focus on equipping families to nurture Unitarian Universalism in children all week long.

  • Social media and the internet are embraced as valuable tools for building families’ connections with UUism, the congregation, and one another beyond Sundays.

  • Karen Bellavance-Grace describes it as “a mash-up of good old-fashioned family ministry, first century-style mission-driven church, and a faithful leveraging of technology and social media to expand the reach and breadth of our ministries.”

How Do You Do It?

  • Simplify Sunday Morning preparation to enable more staff bandwidth for curating resources for families.

  • Curate sharable videos, prayers, discussion questions, at-home projects, and more. Relate them to the theme of each week’s worship and programs.

  • Share curated resources on your website, and push them to families through Twitter, Facebook, text, or some other reliable channels that families will know to respond to. Closed Facebook groups enable discussion between families, which can be particularly bond-building.

  • Some congregations share take-home pages or activity cards on Sundays so that families can do them together at home.

Resources to Draw On