Teenagers praying deeply, in the park

I am pretty sure there wasn’t an electronic device hidden in that huddle.

Last Sunday I snapped a picture with my phone of teenagers praying deeply in the park, after church. Something must have gone right that morning.

We did something different, & we stepped out of our usual boxes. We got 3 communities together (North London, East London, and 43LG), hired a bigger venue, invited people to have a stall, organised a picnic and some sports to top it off.

We had 200 seats and were hoping we would fill most of them. In the end we had to ask the hotel for extra chairs, and still some ended up standing or sitting on the floor. It just shows, people like to come together across community lines.

There were limitations with the venue in terms of layout and I got a lot of feedback about the message being too long, amongst other things. So there are some clear areas to work on. Due to the extra venue hire, we were able to make the whole of 43LG available to Chris Le Bas and Ajay Rai for the Sunday school. And generally many people just helped out.

Sharon Greaves-mann prepared some beautiful flowers without anyone asking for them, and certainly didn’t want anything for them when offered. Special touches like that made all the difference.

Everyone voiced their agreement on next time: we can definitely invite the congregations South of the river to join us. Then the only question is which side of the river do we meet on, or do we just meet on the river….? We are thinking of the 3rd week of September.

Here is a link for the message on ‘working out your calling in life’:

(it really was way too long and I felt sorry about that, and need to work on my content more. Three chapters of Samuel was a bit too ambitious.)

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/34906529

Thank you to everyone who agreed to put on a stall to promote their activities and social action. Again, we learnt that you need more space. So room to improve there.

The picnic was a hit. Many had prepared lovely lunches, and a few got take outs from KFC. We heard that those who didn’t make the picnic headed off to Queensway to hang out there, so lots of fellowship going on all over W2.

A Summer Hat

Ipswich meets West London

Cricket & Umpire

The umpires FINGER decides

Boulles: a French game. There was a ladies tournament after us, and teams kept coming together all afternoon.