The Family Table

Save the Date: Dads & Kids Mario Kart Tournament

Dads and Kids, coming up in just under two weeks, join us on the evening of Friday January 16th at 6:00 for a Mario Kart Tournament! Spend an evening connecting with your kid(s) and other families playing Mario Kart on various gaming systems, snacking, and spending some time in the Word. This is a special event for dads and kids to enjoy together. See Jordyn if you’re able to provide a gaming system with Mario Kart, a spare TV we can use, or are willing to bring a snack along!

WinterCON

Students in grades 6-12, you’re invited to join us March 13-15 at WinterCON, a conference that will encourage you to go deeper in your walk with God and grow your ability to live out your faith in your everyday life. Taking place at the Kalahari Resort in the Poconos, one of the largest indoor water parks in the country, you’re sure to have a meaningful and fun weekend with us! Abe and Jordyn Skacel are planning to lead the group from LEFC. For more information, visit the website and see the FAQ sheet that you may have received in your church mailbox. If interested in attending, please let Jordyn know ASAP. For more information, email [email protected].

Family Bible Week 2026

Save the date for Family Bible Week June 14-18, 2026! Be sure to plan your family vacations and activities around this date so your family can participate as we shine a light on who Jesus really is! Be considering how you might be able to fill critical roles to make this year a success.

This Week’s Challenge: Taking a Look at our Schedules

With a new year upon us, it’s a great time to take a look at our calendars. It can be tempting to allow activities, practices, playdates, school functions, vacations, and even work, if left unchecked, populate our calendars to a level that leaves little room for nurturing the most important priorities in our lives. Things like church, family dinners, personal Bible reading time, prayers before bed, and even quality family time, can get squeezed out because we simply leave no room for it. It’s easy to find yourself saying “I’ll get to it tomorrow,” or “things will be better next month,” but if healthy habits aren’t protected and built in, it’s all to common for them to be squeezed out time and time again. This week’s challenge is to take a good look at your calendar for the upcoming year, or even just the remainder of the school year, and see what might need to decrease on it so that the things that matter most can increase. If you find it hard to make time for things such as daily Bible reading, you can even consider blocking that time off just like you would a practice or appointment. Lets prayerfully make 2026 a year of balance and healthy routines for our families.

Encouragement from the Quick Family

In last week’s challenge, you may remember being challenged to create a Bible reading plan for 2026. The Quick family has done just that! Curtis writes,

“As we begin a new year, Steph and I are planning to read through the Bible in a year with our girls. While finding time in the evening when we are all home is difficult at times with the girls’ activities and running them places, we are planning on having family Bible time when all the activities are done for the evening. We are going to use this as a wind down time before bed. We will be using the Bible plan that the Church has available. I don’t know where this journey will take our family. I will be praying for encouragement and discipline for me and my family during this upcoming year.

We will read the family section together with our girls before bed. After we read the section marked for family I will ask my girls the following questions. I ask myself these questions when I am studying the Bible on my own. 1. Who is the passage about and what is going on in the passage? This is a simple question, but it might help your children or you to understand what is going on. 2. What does the passage say about God? This question might be more difficult for kids to answer, but it also can be an easy question for adults to answer as well depending on the passage. 3. How can I apply this passage to my life today? This question again might be more difficult for children to answer, but you can help them get there. You might have to think about this question as well. How can a passage written about and to people in the Middle East thousands of years ago apply to my life? An easy answer to this question is that those people that lived all those years ago had the same struggles that we have today if not worse struggles, and 4. How does this passage relate to Jesus? This might be the most difficult question to answer. There are ways to see Jesus in Old Testament Scripture being on this side of the Cross. To me one of these instances is seeing how Jonah being in the belly of the big fish for three days relates to Jesus being in the tomb for three days before coming back to life.

This is our plan. Will we miss some days, yes, as we are not perfect. We have the intention of doing this with our girls. Feel free to reach out and ask us how it is going. That may help keep us accountable. Your children might ask you questions that you don’t know the answer to and that is fine. Be honest with your kids, tell your kids that you don’t know but you know someone who does and reach out to an Elder, a friend, or Pastor Matt.”

Let’s help encourage the Quicks in their Bible reading and help keep each other accountable in 2026!

“God Brought His People Home” Kids Bible Class Devotional

You have free access to a family devotional based on the curriculum our kids are studying each week in KBC! It’s called “The Gospel Project at Home.” Today’s Bible Study is “God Brought His People Home” (Volume 6: Unit 17: Session 1), and the devotional can be found at this link.

Visit the Family Ministries page on our website for information about how to access The Gospel Project at Home for the first time.

And for Dessert…

This week’s recommendation for family discipleship is an artist that has created music for little ears to write scripture and Biblical truths on their hearts. Dana Dirksen’s music, geared towards young listeners, has been heard in my (Jordyn’s) car for five years now. I love that her music is fun for young listeners and is an easy way to “feed” my kids truth.

In her discography, you’ll primarily find two focuses: Songs for Saplings, and Questions with Answers.

Songs for Saplings is a collection of songs derived directly from scripture. These melodies are catchy and fun, and I love that they are helpful tool to aid kids in scripture memorization. Even I, as an adult, have found that I’ve unintentionally memorized scripture because of listening along! Some of the verses that Dirksen sets to song are John 6:48, “I am the bread of life,” 1 Peter 1:25, “But the Word of the Lord endures forever,” and Ephesians 5:20, “always giving thanks to God…”.

Questions with Answers is a series of albums that takes the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a concise summary of Christian doctrine organized into questions and answers, and creates a song for each one. Questions such as “Who is God?”, “What is Sin?”, “Did Jesus ever sin?”, and “Who wrote the Bible” can be found among the series, giving little listeners a helpful framework for understanding the foundations of the Christian faith.

I commonly catch myself hearing a verse in church, reading it in my Bible time, or seeing it written somewhere and realizing that I’m unintentionally singing the song in my mind! I love listening to Dirksen’s music in the car with my kids, and I’ve found them singing along on multiple occasions. It is a wonderful way to grow in scripture memorization. I encourage you to give it a listen, even if your kids are older!

Jordyn Skacel, Director of Family Ministry
Matt Mitchell, Pastor