Marlow United Methodist Church is known to have an older congregation, Hank Vest said.

However, the church, located in Summerdale, is making a push to attract a younger age group and more families to join its’ congregation. That is why the church recently started its’ new Boondocks Children’s Ministry program.

“What we’re trying to do now is attract younger people and families,” Vest, program director, said. “We want to retain the kids and families. We can’t retain them without a good kids program.”

The program began four Sundays ago, and Vest said the number of kids attending has grown each week.

“This is open to anyone,” Vest said. “I think we’re on target here. The first week, we had seven kids come. The second week, we had eight kids, and the third week we had nine kids.”

The program focuses on kids from the kindergarten level to fifth grade. Kids come to the program on Sundays while their parents are at church. The program runs from 9:45 a.m. to 11:15 a.m., an hour and a half to fit in all the curriculum.

However, it’s not an ordinary set of curriculum. There’s a central theme that guides the program. Located right behind the church is Fish River, and the teaching techniques are centered on an environmental setting and atmosphere to accompany the lessons taught.

“The curriculum is environmental, creationism and traditional bible teaching,” Vest said. “It’s kind of different.”

The props used — which include a boat, a fishing net, a dock and a tree — are all real, too.

“Members of the congregation donated things from their boat houses,” Babette Heilmeier, the church’s publicity director, said. “Those are real shutters for the puppets. The decking is old decking board. The trees are real trees. The boat is real. Nothing is fake.”

Vest and Michele Benefield are the two mainstays who run the program, and each Sunday they go through the curriculum with the kids. It begins when the children come in and are introduced to a song. However, the song is changed up a bit to apply to that week’s lesson.

“We’ll re-write the lyrics so it’s appropriate for the lesson,” Vest said. “The first lesson is ‘Fishers of Men,’ and that lasts six weeks. So we’ll have six weeks of songs that will tie into that lesson.”

Then, the kids move on to the object-based part of the teaching.

“We’ll pick up some kind of artifact and tie it into being a Christian,” Vest said. “For the first lesson, since it’s ‘Fishers of Men,’ I used a fishing net.”

Next, is the bible verse teaching, which goes along with the long-time, traditional practices of the church.

“Our church has been around for a long time,” Vest said, noting it was built in 1903. “Our demographic strongly believes in the bible verse and how it helps children learn their religion. So, we have traditional bible verse memorization and we scramble a verse and the kids will place the words in the correct order.”

A new feature that has been added is the use of puppets.

“The puppets give us the opportunity to interact with the kids about whatever is on their minds,” Vest said. “We thought about making it scripted, but then we decided not to do that because we wanted it to be open.”

The final part of the program is the kids’ interaction with “Mr. Wisentree.”

“This is where we do our prayer journals and prayer requests,” Vest said. “We’re going to have the kids in front of the tree and they will actually interact with it. We’ll have someone behind it. The kids will make their requests, and we’ll talk about it the next week.

“Also, each week I bring in an animal of some sort and we take it outside as a group,” Vest said. “We teach that the creatures of the earth are God’s domain. There’s a real environmental effort in the program.”