Nigel Beverley-Stone, Church Secretary at Sutton St. James Baptist Church writes:
When I joined the church in late 2018 we had a large number of youngsters who attended our Sunday morning service and they were led in Godly play by Arnie Hensby. When Covid came around in 2020 the restrictions meant that we only met by way of YouTube and that was a good way to keep us in contact.
After Covid the families with children did not come back and this caused the problem of how to run events that would appeal to the young people of the village. Our then Pastor Sue ran pancake days and involved the school children in flower festival preparation days.
We have been holding a New Horizons group for older children but little for younger visitors. So we decided that we needed a fun event for our younger village children. We decided to use the opportunity of the May bank holiday Saturday afternoon to offer a free of charge event for the village. It was a leap of faith, we used funding we had set aside to reward church volunteers. We asked those same volunteers to help us run a BBQ, a bouncy castle which we hired in, to help serve food and drinks in the church kitchen and to offer ice creams, and cool drinks.
The estimated visitors were approximately 70 many of whom we had never met before. The children loved the limitless bouncy castle together with board games which came with prizes. The parents loved an event which was local and free and we loved meeting them all.
And what would you expect from a God inspired event? We received enough donations to be able to share a small profit with the other church in the village, truly a win-win.