June event 1 - Picnic in the park

June has been a very hectic month beginning with our "Parish Picnic in the Park" on after the 10.30 a.m. service on Sunday 9th June.
Tim writes :-

"Sunday 9th June saw about 30 of us arrive at the Botanic Gardens.  The ages ranged from 1 to about 81 with those at the extremes of the age range spending most of the time with their eyes closed - snoring!

It was a glorious day and the hats on show were as diverse as the picnics themselves.  Harris tweed flat caps, knotted handkerchiefs and very dodgy sun caps must have looked like an Easter bonnet competition gone wrong.

As for the picnics, some had gone to a lot of trouble.  Some had gone to Tesco! 






Games, ice cream, 

water bombs, vicars playing rugby 

and friendly dogs were all part of the fun 

and some of us enjoyed some competitive sport with our friends from St Simon & St Jude based loosely around netball and cricket!"

It was great to see so many people supporting the event and the weather could not have been kinder.  We're all looking forward to next year's picnic already!"

Thank you for this Tim and also thank you to Jim for supplying the photos.  It sounds as if you all had a great time!

GUESS - Good Friday 2011

Parentss and children came along to GUESS at St.John’s on Good Friday (Friday 22nd April). GUESS stands for God’s Unexpected Easter SurpriseS. Participants went through the events leading up to Easter and were encouraged to identify the surprises!

Helpers spent some time preparing for their arrival.

When they got there each family was given a booklet about the Easter story with clues to what God’s surprises were!

Christine welcomed everybody and explained the format of the afternoon.

They began by talking about The Last Supper with Joyce. They were surprised to hear that Jesus – King of Kings and Lord of all – washed his friends’ feet before they had the meal! They talked about what people eat at the Passover meal and discussed what happened at this particular meal – Jesus’ last meal before he was killed.

From the last supper everybody went on to talk with Jane about what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was disappointing to hear that Jesus’ friends fell asleep when he was so upset and praying to God but the biggest surprise was that Jesus healed one of his attackers after Peter had cut off his ear. (He told Peter off too and told him to put down his sword!)

After Gethsemane everybody moved to discuss, with Sally-Ann, the events leading up to The Crucifixion at Calvary. This was all horrible and the biggest surprise was that with all his powers Jesus never said anything to defend himself before Pilate and did nothing to escape from the horrible situation. Even when he was dying on the cross he asked God to forgive the soldiers and his persecutors because they didn’t know what they were doing!

Finally they reached the good bit when they visited “The Tomb” with Rachel and discovered the most amazing surprise of all – that Jesus is alive!

After all that hard work everyone went into the hall to do some craft activities to remind them of the story of the events leading upto and including Easter.

They made reversible crowns – one side represented the “Crown of thorns” and the other was a golden crown. The former to remind us about how the soldiers laughed at Jesus and the golden crown to remind us how he now reigns with the father in glory!


They also made wine cups to remind them of the wine that Jesus shared at the Last Supper, and which we still share today during Holy Communion services, to remind us of how Jesus “shed his blood”, i.e. died, for us to save us from our sins.

More reminders of the Last Supper came when the families made their own drinks (there was not enough time to make wine) and a small loaf of bread.

In addition to all that everybody worked together to create an “Easter Garden” of Golgotha (the hill on which Jesus was crucified) and the tomb. This was moved into Church to be ready for Easter Day. It will be there for a little while so, if you haven’t already, why not come to church to see it.

The afternoon ended with a search for pieces of silver in the church. This was to remind us of how Jesus’ friend Judas betrayed him. Because some people found more than others some of the helpers collected them up after the hunt and shared them out equally for people to take home.

Everybody had a lot to take home at the end of the afternoon and a lot to think about!

WOW - Final day

We spent this morning thinking about "Living Things". We began in awe of the amazing variety of living things. In 5 minutes we had thought of 95 different types and we still had many more in mind.

We all made a "Grass Head". At least it doesn't have any grass yet but we hope, if we keep it moist, it will have in a few weeks time!!! They were quite complicated to make.

We began with an old sock.

Then we found a pair of buttons which Christine kindly sewed on for us - as eyes!

After that we put grass seed into the toe of the sock before filling it with potting compost!

Finally we had to soak our head in a bucket of water - that's our grass head, of course, not our actual head - before sticking a mouth on the front and standing it in a recycled cup!

They look a bit weird but hopefully they will look better when the grass grows!

We also made some milk bottle fish. Annie and Chris squashed the bottles and cut out the tails and we decorated them.

Amazingly, they looked pretty good!

When we had done that,we went into the grounds to see if we could find any living things out there. It was pretty chilly but at least it didn't rain!

We saw grass, trees and flowers and were amazed to see the fungi growing in the grass.

We were not so confident about the bees that we saw collecting nectar from the flowers.

We also found minibeasts under logs - mainly spiders, ants and woodlice!

We finally finished our song and put it together with our shakers, and Sue's flute, in church. It sounded pretty good! Listen out for it on Sunday!!!

We ended the morning with a story that Jesus had told about 2,000 years ago. It was a parable - the parable of the Sower! It can be found in the Bible (Matthew 13 verses 1-9).

We all felt quite sad that this was the last day of WOW but many of us are looking forward to the service at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday.

WOW Day 3

Our focus for the day was energy and power! We began the morning with Christine trying to win £1,000,000. Unfortunately, in spite of her best endeavours, all she won was a sticker.


Shaun told us all about sources of electricity and demonstrated how a wind turbine worked. Some of us managed to spin it fast enough to light the light (since there was not enough wind to turn rotor blades which should have done the work).

We also managed to make some wind powered cars. They were a bit fiddly but they all worked in the end!

However, some worked a lot better than others. We decided they'd never really catch on!

Annie explained how electrical circuits work, then.....

......using batteries we managed to light a number of light bulbs in a variety of different ways.

Today we added another verse to our song which we accompanied with the Shakers we had made on Tuesday.

The church organist came in to show us how the organ worked.

She played some wedding music for us.

We compared the organ with the recorder and the flute.

We looked at the organ pipes but there were too many to count.

We also got to look inside the organ and watched the bellows inflating. We noticed that there were some wooden pipes as well as many metal ones inside the organ.

It was another good day and we finished with the story of Jesus exerting power over the winds and waves. Only God can do that!