Lilly Endowment awards $971,000 grant to Boston College
Lilly Endowment Inc. has awarded a $971,000 grant to Boston College to support a Church in the 21st Century Center project aimed at strengthening and nurturing children's worship practices through innovative experiential and formational faith programming and events designed to build a community focused on helping children find God in their everyday lives.
The four-year grant, awarded through Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative, will enable the C21 Center to establish the Catholic Children’s Ministry Partnership (CCMP) where a cohort of 100 parishes throughout New England and New York will be connected to the center’s repository of multimedia resources and programming for children and families.
The Church in the 21st Century Center Director Karen Kiefer (Gary Wayne Gilbert)
“The C21 Center is profoundly grateful to the Lilly Endowment for its generous support of the Catholic Children’s Ministry Partnership,” said C21 Center Director Karen Kiefer. “This grant is an extraordinary opportunity that will help Catholic parishes and families nurture children’s faith and imagination and foster in them a lifelong friendship with God.”
The grant will enable the center to enhance and expand its proven resources for children and families into robust platforms that will be shared for free through a password-protected portal serving as an exclusive hub for the cohort parish staff and families. The CCMP will feature four distinctive C21 programs: the Breakfast with God Worship Programming, the Drawing God Program, the Growing God Care for Creation Project, and the Misfit Sock Advent Prayer Tradition.
The C21 resources for children are fully inclusive and use music, art, singing, planting, baking, and storytelling as catalysts to enhance a child’s worship practices. Through videos, children’s books, activities and experiences, downloadable companion/curriculum guides, and training videos, catechists and parents will be empowered to profoundly impact the way children experience God’s love through worship.
Led by Jesuit priest Quang Tran, S.J., and preschool teacher Anne Krane, Breakfast with God is a children's faith formation program that creatively wraps prayer, song, and a children's story and craft in a Gospel message. The program, launched in concert with the Lynch School of Education and Human Development’s Roche Center for Catholic Education, was livestreamed Sunday mornings for a total of 80 episodes during the pandemic when families were unable to gather in person for Mass. The grant will allow C21 to professionally produce 12 new episodes that will be available for use by the parishes in the cohort. Each thematic episode will have a companion guide and curriculum to support the parents and catechists.
The Drawing God Program began with the publication of Drawing God, a children’s book authored by Kiefer that explores faith imagination and how everyone sees God differently. The Drawing God Program has expanded into a suite of resources that includes an online art museum, downloadable curriculum guides, a World Drawing God Day celebration, and Drawing God prayer ribbons.
Kiefer’s second book, Growing God, anchors another C21 multimedia resource, the Growing God Care for Creation Project. It includes a virtual farm and the Be A Sower campaign. The grant will enable C21 to build the curriculum on this platform, according to Kiefer.
The fourth resource is one focused on Advent. Inspired by the book The Misfit Sock, this program encourages children to write a prayer for each day of Advent and place it in their hanging Misfit Sock. On Christmas Eve, the Misfit Sock transforms into a gratitude sock. “The thing I love about this tradition is it creates a great memory not only for children but also for the parents,” said Kiefer. “They can look back later and see all their children’s Advent prayers.”
The culmination of the grant will be a two-day Catholic Children’s Ministry Partnership conference at Boston College. Kiefer expects that by the end of the grant period, at least 5,000 families will have participated in the CCMP initiative. She said the hope is to ultimately expand the reach of the CCMP initiative to parishes and families nationally, helping more children come to know God and grow in faith.
“We have ready-made resources for the parishes in our cohort that are free and have been proven to be successful,” said Kiefer, who taught religious education in her parish for 25 years. “We're not trying to replace what the parishes are doing, we're just giving them more ideas and options.”
The CCMP models one of the objectives of the C21 Center, which is to establish partnerships between Catholic higher education, Catholic parishes, and families.
“I think bridge building is so important for the future of our Church,” said Kiefer. “All of the Catholic Children’s Ministry Partnership resources are bridges between BC and the parishes and the home or Catholic school.”
She continued: “While we're focused on children's ministry, there is also an opportunity to build partnerships with this parish cohort and make them aware of other free and powerful resources C21 has to offer.”
To learn more about the Catholic Children’s Ministry Partnership or to join the parish cohort, contact Karen Kiefer at karen.kiefer@bc.edu.