The St. Matthew Sunday school children have been busy this season! On St. Nicholas Day, the St Matthew Parish hosted a party for the residents at St. Matthew House. Through the generous donations of the St. Matthew parishioners, each resident received gift cards to Amazon and Harris Teeter. The Sunday School children presented each resident with boxes of delicious, homemade cookies, and treated the residents to a concert of Christmas carols.

The next weekend the children performed their annual Christmas pageant. 

See pictures from both events on the Parish Events page.

Sunday School meets after Divine Liturgy each Sunday from September through May and is open to all children – visitors are most welcome!

• Classes for students from Pre-K through High School
• Open Door Policy – parents are always welcome in the classroom
• Subjects include Orthodox Faith, Holy Scriptures, and history of the Orthodox Church

Past activities and outreach include:

• IOCC disaster relief efforts
• Food package preparation for area nursing homes
• Coat collections for local charities
• Lenten Icon painting
• Lazarus Saturday activities and Confession class
• Coffee Hour assistance
• St. Thomas Sunday egg hunt
• Annual Feast Day presentations

For more information contact sundayschool@stmatthewoca.org

The Sunday School held their annual Easter Egg Hunt on Sunday after Pascha. The glorious weather helped to contribute to a fun time for our St. Matthew children of all ages!

Sunday School 2025 Grassroots Lenten Drive

The Sunday School would like to thank the Parish for your generosity for our 2025 Lenten Drive for the Grassroots Crisis Center. For this drive, Sunday School children made announcements to the Parish, carried items to storage, helped to buy items with their families, and helped to deliver the donations. 

The Sunday School would like to thank the Parish for your generosity for our 2024 Lenten Outreach Drive for Grassroots. For this drive, the Sunday School children decorated fliers, made announcements to the Parish, helped to buy items with their families, and helped to deliver the donations. 

In total, we were able to deliver around $1200 worth of needed items to the Grassroots shelter/crisis center! The things we were able to bring included :

• 130 microwavable canned/packaged meals (Hormel Compleats, Easy Mac, Chef Boyardee, and similar)
• 12 packs/boxes of diapers in a variety of sizes (that's over 1,000 diapers!)
• 30 packs of wipes
• 3 tubs of baby formula
• 6 packs of laundry detergent pods (that's 224 pods)
• 162 juice boxes
• 26 tubes of toothpaste
• 16 sticks of deodorant
• 6 bottles of shampoo
• 6 bottles of conditioner
• 4 bottles of 2 in 1 shampoo/conditioner
• 10 bottles of body wash
• 23 razors
• 174 bottles of water

Thank you to everyone who helped to make this drive a success!

SUNDAY SCHOOL RECENT EVENTS

Spring 2023 - The Sunday School Completed there Lenten Project for Grass Roots Crisis Intervention Center - highlights can be found in Parish Events.

Winter 2022 - St Matthew Sunday School had a busy December!

The St Nicholas Day celebration on December 3rd was a wonderful event. Check out the photo gallery under Parish Events.

The Annual Nativity Pageant was held on Dec 11th. You can view the video here.