3142 Edition
May 14-20, 2012
Church Ministry News

Reported by Chen Wei-chien

Written by Lydia Ma

In the front courtyard Sinapalan Presbyterian Church on a Sunday afternoon, a bunch of kids accompanied by their parents sit and listen to a story. After the story ends, they move on to the next activity, which is making some crafts. Finally, they help clean up the church by doing some light chores before heading home. This simple afternoon program was recently designed by Central Bunun Presbytery in an effort to encourage parents and children to spend time together by reading books.

The first leg of the program, which ends in May, is run by Taiwan Fund for Children and Families and involves reading and doing crafts. Nearly 40 children and 10 parents attend this program regularly, in addition to 10 church volunteers who serve as staff members. The children’s age range from 5 to 12 years of age and the staff are mainly church youths or Sunday School teachers. The rest of this program, which a second leg set to begin in June, will be run by the church.

This afternoon program typically begins at 3:00 p.m. A teacher will first read aloud a story and then the children and the parents will play a game together. The game will be related to the story or it will be related to a church festival. However, what makes this program unique is that children are required to do some light chores to help clean up the church’s environment before they head home.

According to Sinapalan Church’s pastor Fafa Manqoqo, youths and adults usually play volleyball after church services on Sunday afternoons in the plaza in front of the church, but children don’t have any activities planned for that time. This new program’s goal is to draw parents’ attention to the importance of reading in the lives of their children.

“This activity is very helpful in nurturing the relationship between parents and kids,” said Fafa Manqoqo, adding that many young mothers in his Bunun indigenous community look forward to it. He underscored that it is important to help parents get involved in every stage of their children’s development because many parents are so busy making money that they neglect their children. The church’s goal is to change the parents’ perspectives on child-rearing and lead them to realize that educating children is not the responsibility of schools alone, for parents are oftentimes the most influential educators.

When interviewed about the future direction of this program, Fafa Manqoqo said that since the church will be responsible for the rest of the program, he felt that church staff needed some professional training on reading discussion techniques. For this reason, he enlisted the help of Taiwan Fund for Children and Families, which has a branch in Nantou, and asked the organization’s help in training church staff. As the rest of the program will be managed by the church, stories may include more Christian themes in the future.

Fafa Manqoqo also hopes that indigenous culture and indigenous languages will gradually be included into this reading program because most of the stories they have read are in Chinese. Not only does he hope to use Bunun ethnic stories to teach the children, he also hopes to use books introducing the cultures of other indigenous groups.

Fafa Manqoqo remarked that one unexpected yet pleasant outcome of this program is that children became less prone to litter. He explained that the original intent behind assigning some light cleaning tasks at the end of the day was to teach children to be responsible for the tasks assigned to them and teach them that keeping the church environment clean is the responsibility of every member. But once the children began to clean the church on a weekly basis, Fafa Manqoqo noticed that the children also learned not to litter in church and consequently, the church’s environment became noticeably cleaner.