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09/08/2021 08:30 AMDorota Xeller invites the community to come out to Christ Episcopal Church of Guilford on Sunday, Sept. 12 for Welcome Back Sunday at the iconic stone building in the town center, 11 Park St.
The morning’s worship at 10 a.m. will be followed by a celebration at 11:30 a.m. where the community can enjoy free food, music and fellowship. They’ll also meet Dorota, the church’s new director of Youth & Family Ministries, working together with Middle and High School Youth Leader Will Parker.
“It’s open to the entire community, ages 0 to 99 and plus,” says Dorota, who is hoping the weather will allow the event to be held outdoors, where church high schoolers will be helping her to run activities for kids.
Other elements planned for the day will include a music portion provided by Parker and plenty of conversation and camaraderie.
“We really invite everybody in the community to come and check us out and see what programs we have for the upcoming year,” says Dorota. “So I’ll be talking about Sunday school; I’ll be talking about enrichment art we’re trying to implement in terms of music performances at church, renting out space for recitals—just opening our building, our wonderful stone church, to the whole entire community of Guilford and the shoreline.”
Registration packets will be available at the event for families with children interested in joining Sunday school. Dorota, who started her role at the church in late June, says she expects to see many become interested in what the program has to offer, especially after the response she saw among children who attended the successful summer vacation Bible school at Christ Episcopal Church, which ended in August.
“Judging by my participants from the vacation Bible school, half of them were not really familiar with the church, but they saw [camp] flyers at the library,” she says. “It was an open, free camp, open to all the children from the shoreline, not only Guilford. And people were very happy, we had very positive feedback. So I am hoping that we will get a very good number of people interested in joining Sunday school, as well.”
A Madison resident, wife, and mom, Dorota was born and raised in Poland. As a youth, she toured with the performance chorus group Schola Cantorum Opoliensis Legenda.
“We toured all around Europe. We sang for Jacques Chirac, who then became president of France, and we were invited into different towns all around the country,” says Dorota, who was traveling during the waning years of the Polish communist regime, which came to an end in 1989.
“It was very hard for me at this age, because it was at the end part [of communism], so nobody was really allowed to go to west, everybody was only allowed to go to Russia,” says Dorota. “So I was very lucky that my parents would let me go. I was seven years old when I went to Belgium, all on my own, and stayed there with a family I did not even know! I didn’t speak Flemish at the time, but I picked up a lot of languages.”
In college, besides studying music, she studied English literature, visiting friends in New York City to help prepare for her master’s thesis about the beat-generation writers of the New York school of poetry. After earning her master’s degree in Poland, she came back to New York and stayed on in this country, meeting her husband, Robert, in Branford. Dorota shared her native language and passion for music with her kids as they were growing up, including son Ryan and stepdaughter Mya. Both are now high schoolers.
“When they were kids, they took classes with me at Neighborhood Music School, where I am on the faculty,” says Dorota.
Many area families have children who’ve worked with Dorota as a teacher of music and movement among seven schools across the shoreline, primarily at Neighborhood Music School in New Haven and East Shoreline Catholic Academy in Branford. She’s been teaching youth for 15 years.
“My music classes for the youth are focused on exploring various percussion instruments, introducing piano and guitar at the very elementary level,” says Dorota. “But none of the music classes can be just sit-down for the entire 45 minutes! I have a background in ballet and modern dance, so I do incorporate a lot of movement in all my classes. There are props, ribbons, a parachute, even a little bit of yoga.”
Blending a bit of yoga into her classes during the months of pandemic was especially helpful to her young students, she adds.
“It was very helpful for their social and emotional wellbeing,” she says.
At Christ Church, “I oversee the entire Sunday school and I prepare the curriculum for the year,” explains Dorota, who will also provide hands-on tutelage as part of the team.
“I will be in-between nursery school-elementary school children, which is my comfort zone. We [also] felt strongly that we need another pair of hands that would lead the older group of children that have basically different interests, different focus, for learning about the church and Bible, and we hired a person that would lead just that group,” says Dorota. “But what we’re trying to do is to bring the whole entire parish together in church, off preparing curriculum that will be transparent with the church with each service, and us in Sunday school, learning the same things every Sunday, together.”
To learn more about Christ Episcopal Church of Guilford and the Sept. 12 Welcome Back Sunday program, visit www.christchurchguilford.org.