A common means of outreach by churches here in the UK is the holiday club – basically a vacation bible school. We will be trying our hand at one next week, albeit in a somewhat scaled down fashion. It will be more like a neighborhood bible club than a VBS, lasting four days, and we are somewhat purposely keeping it low-key. Lord willing, we will be building a weekly after-school bible club on what is gained from the holiday club next week.
It has been a lot of work to prepare for this – mainly due to all of the child-protection issues involved. Someone told me recently that the child protection issue is driving a lot of small churches out of children's work, and after working through all this stuff it is easy to see why. That's one reason why we are planning to keep our first holiday club small, working mainly through personal contacts and/or word-of-mouth without much advertising. But we are praying that the Lord will begin something fruitful out of this work. I know of a church elsewhere in Wales that was started out of a holiday club ministry, so that makes me hopeful about how the Lord can use our own efforts.
11 August 2009
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