Reflections on the Community Fun Day

I have now added a set of photos on flickr for yesterday’s Community Fun Day.

Instead of meeting on Sunday our church threw itself into supporting this event and many of us came as volunteers. This was our worship. A few helped with the set up and stewarding, Heather & Roo did face painting, I was involved with a team from our church in organising a prayer tent and my wife Nettes ran the bric-a-brac stall. The day was initiated by Karis Neighbour Scheme and lots of local organisations got together to arrange it. Everyone worked very hard. Apologies to any I have missed.

In the prayer tent we offered prayer including prayer for healing and laying on of hands. A few completed prayer-cards and posted them in the box. We had a good time praying with these cards at the end of the day. And we prayed with a few in person, anointing at least a couple of people with oil. It was good being a listening ear. People also took away some of the free resources. There were some booklets, we had printed some of Stephanie's poems on card and printed these downloads on how to pray from an excellent website called rejesus.

It was a steep learning curve for me. I'd never really done anything like this before. But I knew that a few from our church had run a prayer tent last year. So I was very greatful to have people around me who knew what they were doing. It is a lot harder than I realised to put up signs on a tent. And one problem with being in a tent is that your papers tend to blow around. It was very quiet at first and I thought that we might have no vistors. But in the end we were encouraged and felt that all who came to the tent received a blessing.

Across the site some good relationships were built with people in the community. For example, both Nettes and I had a chat with the people from our local LETS. I also met Karis's Jude Greenwood, for the first time, who among other things is an associate of Spring To Life specialising in life coaching. And through this event I met Gwen the minister of the Church of the Redeemer who mentioned that her church was starting a Messy Church.

All in all it was a great day. A special thanks to Annabel from Karis for getting this off the ground!