St Mary's Whitegate

News

• Aug10

  God's Big Expedition

  Published: Monday 10 August 2015 10:03:AM
  Author: Teresa Finney childrenswork2@gmail.com

  

  

  Here are some of the people we met and the things we learned at Holiday Club on God’s Big Expedition.

  Peter was one of Jesus’ closest friends and followers, but he made an awful lot of mistakes, in fact when Jesus was arrested, Peter denied that he even knew him.
  But when the Holy Spirit came, Peter preached an amazing message to all the people, many came to know Jesus and the early church was formed.
  We learned that we can Never Make Too Many Mistakes to be part of GOD’S BIG EXPEDITION, but you have to have the right shoes for an adventure, not high heels (although some of the boys did enjoy trying them on).We also learned that we leave Kingdom Footprints when we take the message of God’s Peace to others, so we decorated lots of footprints and made a footprint banner. 
  Stephen was chosen to help the apostles by organising the food.
  Although this didn’t seem like a glamorous job, the Bible tells us that Stephen was full of the Holy Spirit, as well as grace and power, and he did many signs and wonders.
  We learned that you are Never Too Ordinary to be part of GOD’S BIG EXPEDITION, but you need the right food to be an explorer, so we made pitta bread pizza and talked about which foods are healthy foods for an explorer to eat.
  Philip had a very successful ministry preaching God’s Word in Samaria, but God called him away to travel on a desert road. Because of Philip’s obedience, the Ethiopian came to know Jesus.
  We learned that you care Never be Too Near or Far to be part of GOD’S BIG EXPEDITION, and we thought about how God’s message of love has spread all around the world. We looked at maps, and made some of our own.
  Saul had been one of the key enemies of Jesus and his followers – he’d even had Christians killed!
  Jesus met Saul on the road to Damascus; Saul spent the rest of his life following Jesus and sharing his good news and changed his name to Paul, and he wrote lots of letters, so we made post cards.
  We learnt that No one is too Bad to be part of GOD’S BIG EXPEDITION, so we thought about some baddies who had become goodies, and we made Forgiveness hearts because God forgives us.
  Timothy was a young disciple who had been brought up by a godly family.
  Timothy, despite his youth, had great character and was picked by two of the church’s major players (Paul and Silas) to go on mission with them.
  We learnt that No one is too Young to be part of GOD’S BIG EXPEDITION, so we thought about who we could tell about Jesus where we live, or if that seemed a bit scary, who we could pray for, and we marked on a map where we lived and realised that that way we could cover the whole of Winsford in prayer.
  We made journals to record our thoughts and prayers in, and hung up snap shot photos of our favourite bits of Holiday Club. This was a bit of a surprise, as out of all the fun and craziness that was Holiday Club, the majority of the children chose to draw the tea-light prayer activity as their favourite!
  A BIG, BIG thank you from myself, and the 18 children who attended Holiday Club, goes to the 6 volunteers who made all the fun possible. I couldn’t do it without you.