The Sunday Club (Sunday School)
St Gregory's Church
Bedale, North Yorkshire
The picture above shows:The Sunday Club receiving the Millennium Certificate,
with the bird table in the foreground
The Sunday Club is a group of children aged 4 to 13.
1. The children prepared an exhibition on food production for the harvest festival. The leader, Jenny Paton-Williams says:
"Our children baked the bread for Harvest, thus re-inforcing the knowledge of "real food", not something from a plastic bag, reaped from a supermarket shelf. Some of the bread was taken up to the altar for the Offertory in the Eucharist. Usually the bread is a wafer, so the communicants were also reminded of the origin of the elements and many gave positive feedback."
2. The group made a Creation banner. In preparation for the artwork they had a nature trail to get the children thinking about creation, large and small. The central message on the banner is "Thank you". It is highly effective and was entered for the CEL banner competition in London on October 21.
3. One of the leaders has supported the charity Whizzkids for sometime by collecting junk-mail and taking it to a skip in Northallerton Somerfield car-park.
They have now found the address of the organisation to write to to stop Junk Mail being delivered: Write to: Mailing Preference Service, MP3, FREEPOST 22, London W1E 7EZ. Tel: 0345 034599 (phone pad automated call)
4. They have collected stamps for the charity Toc-H
5. The children potted hyacinth bulbs and distributed them to elderly parishioners. This linked the older folks with the life of the young people and contributed in this small way to the life of the local community.
6. The church has a Traidcraft stall once every two months.
7. The children made a bird table and put out food once a week.
8. Small environmental measures have been taken around church life. E.g a draught excluder fitted to their meeting room door. The hall is now stocked with recycled toilet paper and coffee from Traidcraft.
9. Unwanted foreign notes and coins are being collected for Christian Aid
10. The leader writes: "On the first Sunday of January we went through the Millennium resolution. Each child decorated a copy for their family and we made a display. The other activity that day involved dismantling our Jesse tree from Advent, and recycling it to form a Tree of Hope. this is a branch from a local tree blown off in a gale and planted in a pot of polyfilla. On the Tree of Hope are paper leaves, upon which we all wrote something which we hope for in the new century. This was done in a reflective mood and formed our prayers that day. Suggestions included less road accidents, helping at home, cancelling Third World debt. It is proposed that, after Easter, the Tree will go into church and that visitors will be able to add their own leaves. eventually the leaves will be pasted into a book for the Millennium.
Well that's the ten.. I must admit that it has been a bit of a struggle keeping the momentum going. However, just in this exercise of recording it, I have realised what a lot we have covered which would not have been done without the challenge."
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