TFT: Who Are You?
August 30, 2026
Youth Group and Roots Start Dates
Our Youth Group and brand new Roots will kick off for the school year on September 13th at 6:3pm. Be sure to let your 7-12th and 4-6th graders know and prepare for them to get involved!
Fall Retreat is Coming Soon!
Our fall retreat is coming up in just under two months on October 16-18! We want you there! This is a great opportunity for your family to get away with the LEFC family and enjoy fellowship, teaching, and more. Registration is open! Register your family now to take advantage of our Early Bird discount of $5 off, running through September 20th. Join us for a great weekend!
See You At The Pole
All are invited to join West Branch’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes for a time of prayer at the school’s flagpole. Students will meet at 7:10am on Wednesday, September 23rd. Adults, please park at Gethsemane, walk to the flagpole, and join the kids as they pray for their school.
Tell Pastor Matt What Team Your Child Is On
Pastor Matt writes, “It’s hard to believe it’s fall athletics season once again! I love to drop in to see the kids of our church family play their sports, but I need to know when and where the games are. It’s hard to keep track of who is on what team. If you could send me your kids’ sports schedules for this new season, it will help me to make it to more games and spend some quality time with your family.”
This Week’s Challenge: Using Our Words
This week’s Family Friday email from Child Discipleship focused on our words. As parents, we all want to encourage our children, but how often do we actually speak blessings into them and lift them up? We’re talking about more than a simple “well done!” or “great job!”. In Numbers 6:24-26, we read:
“The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
Think about the impact that something like that can have on your child, or how it would make you feel for someone else to speak that over you. The depth of thought, consideration, and intentionality is rich and meaningful.
This week’s challenge is to consider how you might speak blessings over your child. We aren’t all good with words, and that’s okay. But think about what you wish for them, and how you might communicate that. The perfect time to do this might be right before they walk out the door for school, before they go to bed, or before they tackle an obstacle or challenge that they’ve been nervous for. What a blessing you can be by speaking truth and light into their lives!
“Jesus the Promised One” 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 “Jesus Taught about Possessions” (Volume 8: Unit 24: Session 5, 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…
Our recommendation for family discipleship this week is a little book about our big identity.
All kids love to learn about themselves–what they are good at, where they come from, quirks of their personalities, what their place is in the world. All good parents want their kids to know those things about themselves. And our Heavenly Father wants us to know our deepest identity–the one rooted in our relationship to Him.
In Who Are You?, Christina Fox (author) and Daron Parton (illustrator) have teamed up to provide a cute little picture book for young children (ages 3-5) that introduces our little ones to their big identity being made according to the image of God. This book will not solve all of the crisis of identity that kids are facing in our culture today, but it will help to lay a good foundation to build upon.
“…there’s one thing about you that won’t change,
in spite of what you do or some may say.
It is what makes you, you–down deep inside–
and shapes your whole life each and every day.”
In the back of the book, Fox and Parton provide a two-page note to parents and other caregivers that develops a clear and solid basic theology of our identity as image bearers and some good discussion points for talking about these things with our little ones.
– Who Are You? is available for checkout from your church library.
– Listen to interview with the author.
– Find out more on the author’s website including downloadable coloring pages with images from the book.
We hope your family eats it right up!
Jordyn Skacel, Director of Family Ministry
Matt Mitchell, Pastor