Team Leader Stuart Beattie reports on the 'Showstoppers' Holiday Bible Club held from 6th 10th July.

Each day we started off the Showstoppers Holiday Bible Club with ‘Showstoppers LIVE’. This began with 5 minutes of Aerobics lead by Bethany and Jenna to a variety of music. After this we sang our theme song for the week ‘It’s Showtime’ with the leaders at the front doing all the actions. Each day the children were taught a different Bible story. They learnt about Creation, Daniel in the lion’s den, David and Goliath, the birth of Jesus and Jesus’ death and resurrection. We had really good songs throughout the week and the leaders did the actions with lots of enthusiasm!

We taught the children three memory verses during the week and the quiz each day, based on the Bible story, was lots of fun- we had ‘elefun’/ ‘catch the fish’ and my own quiz game ‘Golden Circles’ based on the ITV game ‘Golden Balls’- only we had points on the back of the circles instead of money values.

After ‘Showstoppers LIVE’ the children split into groups based on their ages. Each leader had a group to work with for the week and this was a really good opportunity for the leaders to find out more about the children and to build relationships with them. During the ‘Jesus-And-Me’ time the children had Starsheets to complete. These pages were made up of pictures, puzzles and questions which the group chatted about together. The 4 and 5 year olds had their own special programme during this time lead by Cheryl and Sarah.

There was 10 minutes each day fror juice and biscuits which gave more opportunity for the leaders to chat to the children in their groups. Thanks to all those who came each day to prepare the juice and biscuits and coffee for the leaders.

The children were split into two groups for craft and games for the remaining 40 minutes. The 4-7 year olds would go and do their craft for 20 minutes while the 8-11 year olds played games in the main hall. Then they would swap around. A different leader led the games each day and the children had lots of fun playing them.

The craft each day was led by Richard. The 4-7 year olds drew pictures of one another and decorated them, they made paper plate masks, group drawings, styled their own large people shapes with t-shirts/trousers that had been made by the craft leaders before the children came and made bookmarks out of pipe cleaners and lollypop sticks. The 8-11 year olds also drew pictures of one another, made name badges for their bedroom doors out of lollypop sticks, dyed various white cloth in a variety of colours to make ‘tie-dye’ and they decorated their own cut out people over two days. A lot of time and effort went into preparing for the craft (there were some late nights for some of the leaders!) All the craft was excellent and the children really enjoyed all what they made. Also Richard made a variety of children’s cartoon characters out of large card to decorate the hall and they were fantastic- they really made the hall ‘child-friendly’.

God really blessed us during the week. We made contact with 65 children and out of 61 children, 59 came 2 or more days (we had 4 new children on Friday so they could only have been there one day!) Attendance each day ranged from 43-51 and the children who came were a really great group. They were all well behaved and listened really well to the Bible stories and participated fully in everything that we had planned for them.

Of course this week would not have been possible without all the leaders who came each day. They were excellent in every way from arriving at 9.45am to prepare for the children’s arrival to leaving at 1.30pm after everything had been tidied up and everything was ready for the next day. Also thanks to everyone in the congregation who helped in some way from giving out leaflets to making cups of juice and biscuits. Thanks also to those who were praying for the week- we really did sense God’s presence as we taught the children His word. Please continue to pray for the children who came to ‘Showstoppers’- pray that they will think over what they heard and that they would come and give their lives to Jesus and follow Him. Please also pray that the church will have contact with the children throughout next year- it would be great to see the boys and girls coming to the children’s activities that we have here each week.

Stuart Beattie

Click on the pictures for an enlarged slideshow.