Hello Church!
As I write this… we are beginning to approach Christmas, and it’s come around so fast, (though I do really love this time of year!). I’m excited to share with you what’s been happening and all that’s to come in the new year too!
In the previous INSight article, I mentioned that I was about to have a meeting with a member of staff at Archbishop Tenison’s High School in Croydon. This meeting went really well and I’m now so pleased to be leading the year 8 school assembly every other Monday. This assembly has a Christian context. It’s so wonderful that God has been at work and has opened these doors! The hope will be that the assemblies can run long term, which could then lead to the possibility of running mentoring sessions and prayer spaces, once relationships have been built with some of the students.
I continue to go into Quest Academy on Thursday mornings for the mentoring programme. I am currently working with two students, on a one-to-one basis, and the plan is for these sessions to continue into the new year. These sessions are going really well, the conversations vary week by week, and are based on the needs of the young person.
Hot chocolate on Selsdon high street has officially returned! This is such a wonderful opportunity to have conversation with young people in the local community. We usually have some form of game or ‘question for the week’ for young people to take part in if they want to. So if you see us, on Selsdon high street on a Tuesday after school (during term time) do come say hello! If you’d like to join me for hot chocolate at any point on the high street, please do come and speak with me as it would be so great to have a team of us running this super important outreach!
Rooted has continued to go really well on Sunday mornings. The ‘Discover’ series allowed us to have some great conversations, answering big questions and reflecting on how it impacts our lives today. We have recently started looking at some bigger topics, including evil/spiritual warfare, forgiveness, and justice. We are currently in the process of working on the new series for Rooted starting in January. The plan is for us to be looking at Jesus’ parables, thinking about how they can help us to understand Jesus’ teaching, and how we can apply that into our lives today.
We will also be launching a new group in the new year! I’m really excited to start this group, and it’s called Open house. This is an 8-week cookery course, that will run on Thursday evenings (term time) at SBC. Young people will be cooking the food and sharing a meal together, and most importantly, we will also be having conversations around our relationship with God, and with each other too. Each week, we will be looking at a different theme. More information about this will be coming soon! I need a team to help me lead with this, so if you can commit to any of the weeks, whether that’s every week or just one of them, it would be wonderful to have a conversation with you! Our hope and prayer would be that once this course has completed, it will form a young people’s house group.
We look forward to 2024, and seeing what God will do amongst all that’s going on for the youth ministry here at SBC.
Merry Christmas to you all, and a Happy New Year! Katie Canning