Watching and waiting...

Christmas decorations with salt dough

This morning our Awesome Kids finished the salt dough Christmas decorations... there was paint, spray paint and glitter galore - and the finished products looked amazing!

We also had fun practicing our lines for the kids' Christmas service and nativity play, which will be held on the 14th December.

While we wait for Christmas, we are watching and waiting for God's light. Every time we see or hear about someone helping helping someone or showing kindness - an act of love... we see God's light shining through - a 'Godsighting'.

God is all around us, in us, and working in our world today. Where can you watch for God this week?

Silent Night

We are learning how to sing and sign Silent Night.  You can watch the NZ Sign Language for Silent and Night being demonstrated here.

Silent

Night

Getting ready for Christmas

 This morning our Awesome Kids made salt dough ornaments to decorate our Christmas trees with.

Melanie took them home to bake and will bring them to church next week to be painted. 

Sue kindly pre-cooked a batch of decorations so we each had one to spray-paint gold or silver to take home today.

Here are Harry, William, Andrew and Spencer having a blast with the spray cans!

Parable of the Talents

On Sunday morning we heard the parable of the talents. In Jesus's day, a talent was a gold coin. We were each given some gold coins (chocolate!) and card, and used them to make cards to share with others.

We talked about using what we have to do God's work. We talked about the things we are good at, and gifts we have, and what things we can do to share God's love with others.

Izak used his talent for construction and turned his cardboard into a cool car, using the chocolate coins for wheels!

Ready to shine!

On 9th November, we heard the parable (story) of the bridesmaids and the lamps. We learnt that God wants us to always be ready to shine our lights - to share God's love with other people.

Check out the cool lanterns we made, with working (battery operated!) lights inside! Thanks Dave and Heather for a truly AWESOME TIME!

Filming begins!

A reminder that the first film shoot for our Christmas movie is on tomorrow - Sunday 9 November at 2pm. Contact Melanie for details.

Angelic scene from last year's movie

Twighlight Garage Sale Tonight!

Come along to our parish garage sale, in the car-park of the Chapel Street church from 5pm tonight. Lots of children's toys, books (new and second hand) and goodies. Sausages and scrummy bacon and egg pies would make an easy tea - be there early before they all go!

Kyla's baptism

This morning we celebrated the baptism of Kyla.

Kyla's family and friends were there, and all the Awesome Kids to welcome her into our church family.

Emma and Monica read the bible readings and Jamie said a prayer.

Welcome Kyla!

We heard the story of poor little Tom, who received an invitation to the palace for Princess Kyla's birthday. He begged, borrowed and traded for ingredients to make a birthday cake to give her... a two layered vanilla cake, with ten candles and the reddest, ripest, plumpest, juciest strawberry in the land.

On the way to the palace, he faced a terrible troll, a dark forest, a scary bear and a hungry guard... and by the time he arrived at the party the cake has been destroyed piece by piece. He had nothing to give the princess... but offered her the wonderful story of his adventures with the cake. 

The princess thought it was the best present ever. It was her favourite gift and the beginning of her friendship with Tom.

Tom could have given up, turned around and gone back home when things got tough - but he chose to be strong and continue to the party. 

Jesus wants us to be strong, to remember that it doesn't matter how young or old we are, how poor we are, how small we are, or that things don't always turn out as we'd planned... what matters is that we always try to do our best, to live in God's way serving and loving others... not trying to impress others, but showing God's love by our actions.

We made hangings from recycled CDs with mini mirrors, to remind us to reflect the way of Jesus in the world through our actions... and allow God's light to shine through us.