Save the Dates!

January 4-29

College Care Packages

College Student Care Packages Collection

January 22

HAUMC Soup Potluck


June 26-30

Vacation Bible School

Mark your calendars for June 26-30. We will be partnering with Good Samaritan UMC for VBS again this year. Stay tuned for more details. 

Happy New Year

During this winter break I have spent time praying for each of your families. I don't know what is in store for each of us this year, but I pray that our ministry plans for 2023 will help us build community, grow our faith, and open new doors.


This Winter and Spring we will continue to lead service projects on the first Sunday of the month for all ages to participate in. In our Chapel time we will begin working on another song with the Sunday School kids to be sung in worship sometime in the months to come. We will resume taking a Sunday School offering during Chapel and we will begin using this offering for things like supporting our Serve Sunday Service Projects and supporting Ana and Josue' through Common Hope.

Soup Potluck

Sunday, January 22 • Koinonia Hall • After worship-1pm

Gather after worship in Koinonia Hall for a soup potluck. Bring your favorite recipe and share warm conversation and food! There will be plenty of extension cords for your crock pots!


If you are able to bring food or volunteer, please sign-up HERE.

Care Packages for College Students

January 4-29

Our HAUMC youth will be putting together Valentines Day care packages to send to HAUMC students who are away at college. We are collecting the following items to go inside the care packages: Valentines Cards, candy, snacks like microwave popcorn, ramen, instant mac and cheese, etc. Collection bins will be located in the East Entry through Sunday, January 29.

Family Faith Formation Resource:

Growing our compassion with Blessing Bags

I'm sure you've passed numerous folks standing at intersections with signs asking for help, or trudging through snow banks to get to a bus station buried in snow. We pass so many of them that sometimes we become desensitized to the overwhelming issue of housing insecurity in our city. This week I encourage you to lead your children in taking a compassionate posture toward these individuals by discussing how it must feel to be out in the cold without a place to go home to. And then put together a "Blessing Bag" to keep in your car so that the next time you can safely hand it to one of our neighbors on the street, you can move that compassion into action. 


What to put in a blessing bag? 

I like to use a drawstring backpack because they are versatile, reusable and easy to carry. Then inside the bag I put things like: socks, gloves, hand and foot warmers (hot hands), emergency foil blanket, plastic poncho, hygiene supplies, chapstick, lotion, protein bars, water bottle, single- use packets of laundry detergent, etc. You can also consider putting these items inside Ziploc bags, which can help protect their items from getting wet.


Handing out blessing bags with your children won't change the housing crisis, but it will help train you and your children to respond with compassion and see the world through an empathetic lens. And the items inside might help a person find some temporary relief or meet a need–like the ability to change into dry socks or wash a load of laundry. 


Follow Us!

Hennepin Avenue UMC is on Facebook! Please "like" us at www.facebook.com/HennepinAvenueUMC.To find out more about Hennepin Kids for LYFE, go to HAUMC's website at haumc.org/children.

For any questions regarding Children & Family Ministries,

please contact Keesha Sedgwick at keesha@haumc.org