The Morgan-Gurrs

Since our last blog we have been at the Children’s Ministry/Family Ministry ‘Hand in Hand’ conference in Eastbourne, had various meetings, been to the Spring Harvest Team preparation Day in Derby, and are now in the south, Having had a Family Foundation Trust board meeting last night.

The Hand in Hand conference was excellent. Over 100 packs about Children Worldwide were given out, Steve did really well with his seminar on Puppetry (oodles of excellent feedback!), and many good conversations were had.

The Spring Harvest team preparation day was very useful – all we need to do now is see how we can make some of the themes work for 5 – 7 year olds. We’ll fill you in on other discussions as and when we know more…..

The Board meeting was one of the shortest we have attended – but a good one!

Tomorrow Kay is doing the Child Protection training for staff and volunteers at Dalesdown and then meeting up with one of our lovely colleagues for lunch.

Our full team conference is this weekend, preceded by the Children Worldwide management group meeting on Friday morning – but more of that nearer the time!

You may have seen on our diary that we are running Whizz Kids for Spring Harvest in Minehead on Week three. (13th – 18th April)

This is the group for the 5 – 7 year olds, is great fun and a wonderful experience for both kids and volunteers!

Because of the school holiday dates  this year, and with moving site from Skegness we have lost many of our regular team. Many of them have family and their children will be back at school, others are teachers or students who cannot make it either.

If you can be free that week, and fancy an amazing opportunity to work with children, (And don’t mind going through all the safeguarding checks) go to the Spring Harvest Volunteers page to register an interest.

We’d love to have you!!

Of course if you don’t feel comfortable working with kids, there’s lots of other roles you can volunteer for on the same page.

Meanwhile – we have the site visit tomorrow……. Minehead and back in a day – interesting!

Our diary dates until April have been added again – and hopefully they will stay there this time!

A text version of our news letter is also there, along with a link to the full colour version with photos.

Today should be a snow day – but when you work from home, snow days are just not the same!!

Tomorrow we’re at Glenmere school in Wigston doing an assembly, that is unless they have a snow day!

Steve is currently planning his seminar on puppetry for the Children’s Ministry and Family Ministry ‘Hand in Hand’ conference (Still spaces – and has an excellent programme – go if you can!) and Kay is putting together everything needed for the Children Worldwide stand. If you’re going to the conference, do come and see us – our stand is in the food and drink area.

Do keep checking our twitter updates (on the left) we try to update with every thing we do. If you want to follow us on twitter, our profile names are KayMorganGurr and SteveMorganGurr

Keep warm and keep safe!

Oh dear – it seems our last couple of posts have disappeared – including our up to date diary and our latest new news letter!

We will remedy this as soon as possible, but in the meantime…..

Happy new year to you all!

We’ve hit the ground running this year, with all sorts of things keeping us busy: new publicity to get out, new information for a newly designed Children Worldwide website to write, people to mentor and support and teaching material to write for Spring Harvest!

Today we started the latest assembly run with two assemblies – one in the morning and one in the afternoon. This term we are looking at Naaman and the servant girl. The kids were great – if a little excitable! In the first school, we have to walk through the key stage one classrooms to get to the assembly hall – causing excited mayhem before we had even started! Hopefully, even with having lots of fun, we sent them back in a calmer state than the one they arrived in.

Meanwhile – back to the emails……..

The busyness of Assemblies, meetings, all age services and management of Children Worldwide continues apace!

Everything feels fresh and exciting, not just in our own work with kids, but with the future plans for Children Worldwide too.

Last week we presented the vision and plan for Children Worldwide to our fellow directors/trustees of Family Foundation Trust (The charity that ‘undergirds’ all that we do), setting out our core aims and objectives as they currently stand, and how we intend to improve and implement them in the future.

We can’t say much more about them here as we need to present them to the Children Worldwide Management Group next week, and then let our wonderful members know about the exciting things ahead – but watch this space!

A couple of weeks ago we had a wonderful answer to prayer:
We had been offered a grant towards equipment we use in children’s work, and were told we could use some of it towards a car. With what we had already saved towards a car, plus chipping into our own individual savings, and the addition of this grant, we have bought an 06 reg Citroen Picasso. It’s an ex motorbility car, so it has been very well cared for, and was £1,000 below market price – an internet offer!

Our old car had done well over 99,000 miles, and we could see big bills for it’s up keep in the future, so we had been praying for a long time for a way to get a newer and more comfortable car. We’ve had the Picasso for nearly two weeks now – and love it!

On Sunday morning at 10 am we will be at Sutton Christian Centre doing an all age service.

Follow the link below for our latest news letter. This one gives more information on what we actually do. Enjoy!

Autumn 09 News

We had a great time on Saturday with our friends at Holy Trinity, Tulse Hill! The journey was less than pleasant though – neither of us likes driving through London, but the amount of kit we needed meant we couldn’t really do the train! We did training on story telling, putting together your programme, simple puppetry and a short session on helping children with ASD and ADHD, all finished up with a session on “Why do children’s work?”

This week has been a week of paperwork, emails and preparation for things to come!

On Friday Steve gets to use his birthday present of a Ferrari drive – so he will be driving round in circles, very fast, in a posh car…..we’re sure he’ll enjoy it….a lot!!

On Saturday we are in Sheffield at a colleague’s church, training children’s workers along side other friends and colleagues! Kay is doing a session on positive discipline, and Steve a session on puppetry. Looks like a great day!

Things are now getting very busy indeed – please pray for wisdom in what we do and decisions we have to make day by day, for time for each other, for safe journeys, and also – good and refreshing sleep for Kay.

I know it’s been a long time since our last blog update – we should have updated sooner!

But this is the last couple of months in a nutshell:

Kay’s operation went well, and as a result her health is improving very quickly in many areas – especially the fibromyalgia. She is now off the crutches and down to a walking stick, and hoping to be off the walking stick by Christmas!

Steve did a really good job on the Hungarton camp – as Kay knew he would! The teaching went well, and various members of the team helped out with storytelling and doing actions to songs. Steve commuted twice a day, coming home in between sessions to look after Kay.

Kay didn’t spend her recovery time doing nothing, but in between the compulsory resting she took time to think and pray about all things children worldwide, do some work on child protection/safeguarding policies, and various other admin type things she could do whilst lying down. In other words, even with the recovery time, work has continued – its just hasn’t been ‘on the road’ work.

On 22nd August, Steve’s Youngest son, James, was married to Naomi! A lovely day (see photo) and we now have a daughter in law! It was the first day Kay was allowed out after her operation.

We’ve had a break up in Filey for 12 days, and have come back very refreshed!

The ‘on the road’ work begins with a training day in London on Saturday, working with a church we have done church weekends for in the past, and then continues with more training days over the next few weeks.

We are currently putting together a presentation for our management board about how we see Children Worldwide in the future. We have spent much time praying and thinking this through. We have come up with many ideas and found a renewed passion for the work we do with Children Worldwide and the way we lead it. We will be doing a lot of work on this over the next few months, with a view to re-launching all things ‘Children Worldwide’ after our conference in February.

We will let you know what these ideas are once our members have heard and approved them!

Kay hasn’t been doing twitter much over the last couple of months, as she tends to use it to let you know how our work is going when we are on the road – but we haven’t been on the road! So the twitter updates should start again very soon.

But the next job is – to update to the diary page!

Those of you who check the twitter updates on the left may have noticed a major news flash from Kay.

The out come of her hospital visit was the need to go back into hospital for more surgery (Total hysterectomy). We thought this was to be on 4th August (as announced in the latest news letter – see news letter page). But a phone call on Tuesday changed all our well laid out plans……

The date of the operation is now 14th July – three weeks earlier than planned. This DOESN’T signify a problem! Because Kay has Fibromyalgia, it does throw up a few issues to do with major surgery like this, and her consultant wanted to make sure she had the best team around her, and not on holiday. (The consultant anaesthetist was due to be away on 4th August).

Because of the Leicester holidays beginning today, it also means that no one else wants to have their operations next week – so Kay is the only person on the list! 

So what about the camps we were going to be involved with? Well – Kay won’t be doing any of them! 

For the Hungarton camps in Leicester (Starting on the following Sunday  - the day we hope Kay is to be discharged) Steve will still be doing the morning meetings as planned – starting Monday morning, and doing the teaching Kay would have done. Our pastor has agreed to do the stories (Thanks Andy!) and there are lots of people willing to help. He will commute twice daily and not stay on camp.

All of the Health and safety, and safeguarding things that Kay does have all been handed over too – everyone has been brilliant in just stepping up and taking on various bits of responsibility to make the hand over so very easy! Steve will also continue helping with music in the meetings for both weeks, while mum and friends keep Kay company at home. With Steve having to be carer for Kay for quite some time – both Kay and Steve strongly feel that he should still help with the music as it’s something he loves doing!

We won’t be going down to the Dalesdown Camps, and had already pulled out because of the original date making it impossible to go. Again, others have stepped in to take over the roles we were doing.

Because the operation is so soon after the pervious surgery, and it is a bigger op, Kay has been given strict recovery guidelines. She’ll be gently moving around, but will have to spend most of the first 6 week horizontal, and will have to take things very slowly after that. So – there will be a lot of resting, but when she feels up to it, she’s hoping to do some writing and research (Whilst horizontal!)

The blog won’t be officially updated during the first 1 or 2 weeks, but I’m sure Kay will ‘twitter’ a few comments from hospital – so do check the column on the left for those!

Preparation for all things summer started last weekend with the Hungarton Camp training day. The week one team were treated to a Hungarton breakfast before learning all that will be happening on week one, and then doing some clean up/set up work as team building activities – see photo of one of them! (Our favourite sort of team building – no embarrassment factor!) From that day we can see what a great team we have – for both weeks.
During this week we have finalised the teaching for week 1 of Hungarton – we’ll be looking at Joshua, and applying the theme using sporting themes. The evening theme is “Building” (For those who know we did a building theme for Whizz Kids – we didn’t decide this one – it’s totally different…. although some of the props may be familiar!!)
Hungarton 1 and 2 are both full to overflowing, it’s going to be two very full on weeks for the leaders! Please pray for suitable weather, fun and safety, as well as for children’s hearts open to what God has to say to them during their camp.
There is still space on the Dalesdown Camps (Nr Horsham) – check out www.dalesdowncamps.co.uk if you know any youngster who would like to go (Bursaries available if the cost is too much) contact the office on admin@childrenworldwide.co.uk
For the rest of this week, Kay has been finalising Spring Harvest accounts, as well as preparing presentations, and finalising child protection (safeguarding) documents. Steve has been doing battle with the garden and household DIY – and winning!