Well i've not blogged in ages which is ridiculous really.. So i'm going to take some time in between work prep for Mission on Saturday this week to blog some of the stuff thats happened over the past wee while...
Work has been quieter (thankfully) over the past wee while as I've not been responsible for the Church's Summer Sunday school which in past years has run for 3 full months over the summer, starting at the beginning of June and ending at the end of August. I managed to persuade my management team that provision for the young people over these months was an important part of my time and so we continued the Bible class right up until their 'prize giving' on June 21st. It was a fab night, and a great celebration, including presenting a long serving volunteer Wilma Cox with a special bible etc as she stopped her involvement a few months ago due to work pressures. She's a wonderful person and we had the honour of her presenting the books etc to the young people that evening before one of our Senior's (well he's now a young volunteer) presented her with her gifts and gave an explanation to the church of her commitment and dedication over the past 15 years. Also in the background was the knowledge that this was our ministers last prize giving with us before he retires at the end of August. So a rather emotional evening in many ways. But God's name was lifted high and that was the most important part of the evening if truth be told XD
So after that, we had a bible study with the young people in my flat - was absolutely FAB! I had felt that it would be worth doing even if it would have been a small number, and so we decided that we'd try and aim for a full 5 days in a row. We would meet at my flat at 10am (can't be expecting young people to be getting up tooooooo early, especially when its the first week of the school holidays! LOL) for breakfast... sometimes we'd have bacon butties etc and we had fruit and cereal etc.  But it was a great time of fellowship and it fairly got people relaxed before we got into things. It was rather sweet though.. they'd always make sure that we'd said grace before we ate breakfast, and it was just like having a random and manic family meal together with things getting passed up and down the table... one day Sandy even subjected us to various marmite products, and latterly we even got to have pop tarts!!!! But when we went through to the living room it was all very relaxed as we settled down to read and study God's Word together. Someone would pray and then someone else would take responsibility for leading the morning - everyone took their turn... it was very refreshing.
We studied the book of Philemon with the help of a 'cover to cover' book - i would thoroughly recommend it. Not only did we get to thoroughly read through the book of Philemon (all 25 verse of it LOL) but we would be delving into other passages in the bible which were closely related to the characters in the book. We did character studies on Paul, Onesimus and Philemon as well as looking at themed studies on slavery, forgiveness, culture... The book is actually a 7 week study, but we managed to do one each day with 2 other days a couple of weeks later to finish the study. But it was a great time of study where i think we all learned something, and also built up a degree of accountability and trust within the group that came along... After each study we'd always have a time of prayer, taking different forms each day, from open prayer, to one person praying for all, to one liners - always discussing what we wanted to pray about before hand, taking in prayers for others in the church and our friends and family as well as praying that we could apply what we were learning.
SO all in all it was a very blessed time. I'm hoping that we'll be able to do something like this more often as part of our youth ministry here in Kenmure. It was such a fruitful experience that i think it would be daft to not seek something like this in the future in a more long-term standing..Labels: BIble study, kenmure youth, philemon |
