Children and Young People

We have had another successful year with our Children and Young People. We ran 6 Messy Church sessions and 4 Story Services. Attendance has steadily grown to approx. 30 + children and adults at Messy

Church and around 15 -20 at our Story Services and it has been lovely to welcome some new families as well as building on our existing relationships with regular attendees.

Our annual Children and Young People’s Celebration Service on 6th July was well attended. The young people all received a book; ‘The Story Maker’ by Jerry McCorkle and Erin Straza, which reflected the video shown in the service about the life of Jesus. We were able to present all our leaders with a Speak Out Stay Safe pin badge to recognise that they had completed the foundation level of national safeguarding training – which is great …well done to them!

We have recently updated our role descriptions and risk assessments for all the activities below which feeds into our safer recruitment process and further training both ‘in house’ and national is planned for the forthcoming year.

We are very conscious that our provision does not extend to our young people of secondary age and as a group we are exploring our next steps in this area. We ask for your prayers, ideas and help for the development of our work in this area.

Praise and Play

We have continued to meet twice a month on the first and third Thursday, apart from our break during August. Our leaders remain the same: Janet Black and Elaine Whittaker with helpers Liz Taylor and Nettie Norman. We have regular attendees with numbers of children averaging about 5. We continue have regular adverts/articles placed in the church magazine. We also take the opportunity to advertise our other family events such as messy church and story service plus celebrate children’s birthdays. We continue to use our 4 year rolling programme drawn from Scripture Union and CPAS ‘Bible stuff’ resources, including sessions that follow the main church festivals.

Messy Church

We held a super hero Messy Church in May, they made superhero masks, mini figures and considered what their super powers might be, before looking at Jesus as a super hero. One child summed up a super hero ‘as an ordinary person who does extraordinary things’.  In July we had a Messy Church Summer Sports from an egg and spoon race to welly throwing and we finished with an indoor picnic on rugs on the floor of the Parish Hall.

We opened the new school year with Messy Harvest at the beginning of October, theme was giving thanks and the children explored the story of our food from someone growing it to us eating it. They made junk models of lorries, trains and planes that transport it, printed cogs and made and ate pizza. Janet shared their work at the harvest festival and looked at the word HARVEST and made STARVE – HAVE – SHARE to illustrate the need to give thanks for what we have and to share it with others who don’t have as much Christmas /Advent Messy Church saw the children explore all the people /things that travelled in the Nativity story.

Story Service

We meet almost every month on Sunday in church from 5pm -6pm from November to April. We look at different Christian values through both secular and Bible stories. We have covered Difference, both places and people, journeys, and families, rounding everything off with prayers, a song and very yummy toast and hot chocolate!

Many thanks to the team of folks who make everything happen.

Open the Book – Richard Speed

Church continues to have very good contact with the infant and junior schools. The Open the Book team presents an assembly each half term to each school. This is very well received and many pupils look forward to our visits. To supplement this we have been able to link with the school curriculum rather than the church’s year and have presented an Experience Pentecost to years 3 and 4 this half term. This has been complemented by Miracle stories for years 5 and 6. The school were very appreciative of our efforts and felt it met the needs of the pupils well. Church also hosts the Junior School end of term assembly in church which also features an Open the Book story. Thank you to all those who contribute to this project.

If you would like to join us in any capacity, please have a chat.