Joan Roe, Director of Children's and Family Programs

Joan Roe became the Director of Children’s and Family Programs at Lake Street Church in January 2005. After several years as an at-home mother caring for her two daughters, she is pleased to be filling another role that is both challenging and meaningful.
Joan studied Early Childhood Development at Bennington College in Vermont, and has worked with children in a variety of settings, public and private, paid and volunteer, over the years. Making a church home for the children of the congregation is work especially dear to her heart.

“I think there’s an enormous advantage to learning to think of yourself as a spiritual being while you are still a child,” Joan said. “It’s like learning a language – there are always greater depths and meanings to explore, but I think it comes more easily and naturally if it’s fostered in childhood. Even if you go a while without practicing, it remains there for you.”

A compulsive bookworm (“I was lying on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night suffering from a bout of food poisoning, and I realized that this was not a time when most people would be reading, but I figured as long as I was conscious …”), Joan delights in storytelling, and finds it an excellent venue for interfaith understanding.

“It’s one of the primordial urges – to tell our stories, and to hear and understand others, finding where we overlap.”

In addition to reading, she enjoys watching a wide-range of movies (“Does it have words?” her children will ask suspiciously when she invites them to join her, “English words?”), handicrafts, travel, and listening to the music of her multi-talented husband.