Summer at Roehampton Methodist Church

Megan Thomas blogs on the fantastic holiday-club activities at Minstead Gardens this Summer!

Well, the Summer has come and gone and routine and regularity is back. I hope many of you used Summer to rest and recuperate, however over at Roehampton we were pretty busy!

For the first time in quite a while we decided that we would like to run a holiday club on the Alton Estate. There didn’t seem to be a provision put by for the summer time, so we felt that it was our duty and calling to provide some form of family support on the estate during the holidays. Myself, Geoffrey and Kathy headed up the five weeks of activities with games, baking, crafts, videos, songs and most importantly, FOOD!

It was always a clear intention from the get-go that this holiday club would be Christian themed and as a result, we worked our way through the Bible exploring characters that we thought were ‘superhero’s’. We delved deeper into stories such as Daniel in the Lions Den and Joseph as well as looking at some lesser known stories such as Gideon and Abigail. Our activities covered everything from face painting to baking rock cakes, making friendship bracelets and even painting hieroglyphics. We’ve had so much fun, not only sharing the stories but also re-enacting them and reflecting on why we thought they were superhero-like.  It’s been amazing to see the children get stuck into the Bible stories and have a good time- even when they didn’t know the stories before!

It was great to not only see some friendly faces from the CEDARS youth club, but also some brand new faces! We had children who had never been through the door before or heard some of the stories, so we felt that we were really doing a missional project. We’ve had children say: ‘I’ve never heard that story before’ or ‘I didn’t know anything about him’, but now they do.

As with all community work nothing is ever set in stone and most things are pretty fluid and we found this throughout summer; being flexible in timings and activities. The attendance of holiday club throughout summer tended to fluctuate week to week, but in general we were really happy with who we had there and for the first time running it, we were very content.

We also felt strongly that part of our mission was to feed some of the young people that may not have access to a staple meal throughout the holidays. Thanks to an exceptional team of volunteer cooks, we were able to feed around 13 young people and their families. Thank you everyone involved in making the summer club a success and helping in this important area of missional outreach. We hope to build on our work at Roehampton over the Summer and continue to run projects and activities that reach the need in the community. Please continue to pray for all the work on the Alton Estate and watch out for more to come!

Megan Thomas