About us
The diocese of NY & NE established many committees to help the services around the diocese. The children’s committee is one of those committees.
The Children Committee is led by Father Luke Awad with Fr. Yacoub Ghaly and Fr. Andrew Awad as members.
The ECCCC ( East Coast Coptic Children Convention) is one of the main activities of this committee.
The ECCCC is an annual retreat that serves the children of the diocese aged eight to eleven.
The ECCCC usually takes place in June for two nights and two days.
The ECCCC is a fun-filled spiritual retreat, where the kids get to experience being independent, self-responsible, and also accountable, and bring home lots of great memories.
At the ECCCC, every year, the children learn about a fundamental spiritual topic in our Orthodox faith, through interactive lectures, workshops, songs, activities, and much more.
Some of the topics that the retreat have introduced are:
- The Seven Sacraments
- The power of the Holy Spirit
- Growing in Christ
- My Body is a temple of God
- The Fruit of the Spirit
- The Armor of God
The ECCCC with the grace of God, has grown to be a very desired activity and registration filled right away, registrants reached 400+, so in order to give a chance to all churches, and with the space limitation, an expansion was necessary. With the grace of God this year 2019 the retreat will take place in two locations one location serves the New York & New Jersey region and the other location serves the New England region.
Each retreat location will host 250-400 people that including the children and their servants with a 5:1 ratio from all the diocese churches.
All participating churches usually arrive Friday night for check-in, registration, and bonfire night.
The program starts on Saturday morning which usually consists of four lectures, three workshops, and plenty of outdoor and indoor activities, and ends on Sunday afternoon.
The children are divided into groups accompanied by their servants at all times and guided by the schedule and rules set beforehand.