St. Thomas Heideveld Mission Trip to George
Do you get excited about - kids hearing the gospel; a church reaching out to its community; Christian teenagers being trained in ministry; churches working together in gospel partnership? Well then you would have loved to be at Christ Church George (formerly St. Philips) in the first week of October this year. Six teenagers and two leaders from St. Thomas Heideveld met up with a teen and a leader from Emmanuel PE to run a holiday club with Christ Church volunteers.
Over the course of three days the kids who came heard the gospel presented clearly as we celebrated Christmas in October and learnt who Jesus was through the stories surrounding his birth. As normal the message was reinforced through quizzes, silly games, talks, crafts, worksheets, dramas, and through the testimony and example of the leaders. Children from Christ Church itself as well as many from the community heard the gospel.
Coming from St. Thomas we are used to opening our gates and having a flood of children pour in during the school holiday. We discovered things are a little different in George. Rev Shaun Hunter had to work hard to advertise the club, through local schools, in shopping malls, and even in an interview on local radio. But that exemplified the attitude of the members of Christ Church that we met, eager to reach those in their community with the momentous news of Jesus Christ. So much so that their weekly kids club is run by two of their ‘recycled teenagers’ (now enjoying retirement) who are convicted that God wants children to hear the gospel and that he commands his followers to tell them. They will be able to follow up the children that we made contact with during the week.
At St. Thomas we regularly give our senior teenagers the opportunity to serve at the holiday clubs we run in Heideveld. However the mission in George stretched and developed them further than ever. Firstly they needed to work cross-culturally. Coming from the Cape Flats to the suburbs of George they had to think about how to relate and communicate in a different cultural context, and how they could remove all barriers to the gospel. Secondly we trained them to take responsibility for their own small groups, to reinforce the message of the day, get to know the children, and encourage them personally. Serving the Lord out of their comfort zone really forced them to trust him and develop the gifts he’s given them.
Finally although none of the teams from the three churches knew each other beforehand, and came from different backgrounds, we were instantly united as partners in proclaiming the Gospel of our Lord. Members of Christ Church put us up for the week, baked cakes for the kids, and will do the follow up work. The children’s and youth workers from Emmanuel PE put together the club material. The teens from St. Thomas led with enthusiasm and skill. It was great knowing that as we served, prayed, taught and played together we were one family engaged on our Father’s business.
Please join with us in prayer for:-
- the weekly kids club at Christ Church and their work of discipling children
- the continued growth of young leaders from St. Thomas and Emmanuel
- many more gospel partnerships between church families to reach the lost of our country
The Goal of Training
Sitting in a meeting recently a person made this comment, she said,
“We have got a new leader, they went on a course and now they are trained.”
That comment made me stop and wonder…when is someone actually trained? It is commonly held that someone is trained when they have completed a course, when they have got a degree, when they have attended a set of lectures, when they have mastered some content but is that how it works? When does training end? When can training stop? Can we ever say that someone is now trained?
Tony Payne, Colin Marshall and the guys at MTS in Australia have helpfully developed a way of understanding the process of training and discipleship. It goes something like this….
•Far away from God
•Thinking about God
•Profession of Faith
•New Disciple
•Growing Disciple
•Minister to Others
•Trainer of Others
Every person is somewhere in their spiritual journey, somewhere along that line. Training is simply helping them to move along the line, one step to the right. That process helps us to see the goal clearly. A trainee is trained when they are training others, not when they have mastered material, or attended a course or been awarded a piece of paper. A trainer is trained only when they have understood, embraced and internalised training for themselves.
Here are some implications for when we train:
- Whenever you teach a trainee something encourage them to teach it to someone else.
- As a part of your training read and discuss 2 Tim 2:2 with them.
- Pray with them around Matt 9:38. Get them to pray this with others.
- Expect them to be involved in the process of recruiting and training others. Ask them to do it. Hold them accountable to it. Make time for this in their apprenticeships.
- Keep on training them until you see them training others.
BLAZE KIDS RALLY – August 2012
Blaze kids rally is a CESA kid’s get together of some of the Northern Suburbs and West Coast churches. We get together biannually and our aim is simply to unite our churches together in an evangelism outreach. This term St John’s church,Bothasig hosted the event.
We have several elements that we include in our program. This August our blaze Rally was MC’d by the very entertaining Andreas Geiger. He did a great job making sure that everything was well explained and moved very smoothly throughout the evening.
We then moved very swiftly onto our ICE-BREAKER for the evening run by Lauren Douglass (From St Matthews Church, Table View) . This was a very entertaining game that got the kids from different churches to mingle with those that they did not know already. Each child was handed a bundle of 10 fake paper money, what they had to do was challenge each other to a game of either ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS or THUMB WAR. Whoever won the challenge got a one of the other person’s money and so the game went…
We then got our groove on and praised the Lord in song. The St John’s praise and worship team did a wonderful job leading us in song. It was truly great to hear so many children praising the Lord so loudly in song.
Warren Holland, the recently appointed Children’s worker at Durbanville Community Church, was our speaker for the evening. He did a brilliant job teaching us all from Romans. We learnt that we are all sinners in need of God’s grace, through faith in Jesus. It was a very clear and well taught gospel message.
Then the time that all the guys were waiting for: FOOD TIME. We had hotdog’s, chips, chocolate and cooldrink. We chilled together outside on the grass, getting to know some different people.
The evening ended off on a high note with Deborah and Grant Stein (From Christ Church Blaauwberg) running our review game for the evening. All I can say is it involved 30 seconds and charades and was VERY funny to watch.
So all in all we had a great evening together. Thanks to St John’s for hosting all 140 of us. Thanks to all those involved in the evening. I think the kids had a great time mingling with God’s family and getting to know other Christians a bit more. This is a great evangelism tool and we trust that God is using this event and the gospel preached to reach the hearts of many kids.
Written by:Lauren Douglass
ST. LUKE’S PORT SHEPSTONE: SURVIVOR HOLIDAY CLUB
St. Luke’s Port Shepstone gives thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ for his amazing goodness to us during our "Survivor Holiday Club". It was the third time that we hosted such an event and it was the largest holiday club we’ve had thus far.
We had between 65-70 children per day from the 25th to the 29th of June. Children came from all parts of the South Coast. Fifty percent of these children came from families that do not attend church. What an answer to prayer! What a privilege it has been to be able to impact these young people with a week of Gospel teaching. Our theme for the week was: ‘’Survivor, Salvation Island.”
The lessons were about Sin, Jesus, our Savior, What does it mean to be Born Again, and Heaven a Free Gift. On day four, our Rector, the Rev. Eric Sabela shared a very simple and clear Bible talk about what it means to be Born Again. Eric said to the children, “do you think being born again means you should go back into your mommy’s tummies and be born for the second time?” You could see some of the kids faces light up, almost as if they were saying, “that wouldn’t be a bad idea.” At the end of the talk we explained to the children that they were not too young to be born again and what a beautiful moment it was, in fact it was the highlight of the holiday club when +_ 30 kids, mainly ages 9-13, raised their hands as an indication that they were ready to ask Jesus to be their Lord and Savior.
Through the holiday club, we were able to launch the Jesus Zone, which is our weekly kids club. It is too early to tell, but we are seeing some encouraging signs of people starting to join our services.
Tracey Sabela
Children’s worker