The Morgan-Gurrs

We are back in Leicester – over fed and very tired!

Over lovely hosts in Fleet, and various people from the church have fed us so well – I’m not sure we will want to (Or need to) eat for another week! We have been spoilt and cared for in an amazing way – thankyou to John and Christine who “put up” with us for the week and the various others who also fed us, made us coffee, worked with the children and cared for our every need.

The week went very well, the kids were great – polite and open to the stories and message of the week. Thanks for praying for us all.

The photo is of Steve doing a puppet sketch with the younger children, who were taught and looked after by Steven their minister and the lovely Bee, along with other equally able helpers.

This morning the all age service went well – the church looked like an underwater world with all the craft the children did!

We now have two days to catch up before the travels begin again – check out the diary to see what we will be up to.

We are in Fleet (Hampshire) this week, running another “Beach Party” holiday club. (Yes we know it’s October – but we can pretend!)
Despite the road the church is on being closed for road works, we still had quite a few children, all of whom joined in and listened well. Having done this holiday club for a number of years, we have got to know some of the children well and how they “tick”, which makes life a little easier!

The photos should give a bit of an idea of what went on……
The craft is usually left to the child’s imagination, but this year steered to things to do with the sea or beach. Again, the photos give an idea of what they chose to do.

Do you ever have one of those days when you think your computer/PDA/mobile phone are demon possessed? Well we have had one of those weeks.
We noticed a couple of weeks ago that a date had dropped off Kay’s PDA phone, but just thought it was one of those things – until it came to this week, when we found TWO things had disappeared! One was yesterday – a lecture for one of the YWAM courses and one for today – a lecture for our Future Builder course. We managed to fit them in, but it meant three bookings per day!
Fortunately, having been interviewed as referees for someone in the morning, the Ywam lecture (on working with 5 – 7′s) was in Nuneaton, and the assembly we had that afternoon was also in Nuneaton.
The assembly this morning ended in time for us to drive over to Birmingham, where the Future Builders course is based, to have lunch with everyone and then deliver a lecture on child development, before driving home, having a quick meal before driving over to Hungarton for a camp debrief!!
Tomorrow we are being visited by one of our colleagues, and then Kay will be collecting her dad from hospital in the evening (Nothing serious – tests to check him out after his illness in the summer)
As you can imagine – we are now quite tired – but it doesn’t let up yet. We are in London on Saturday for a planning meeting for the Latvian camps, and on Sunday we drive down to Fleet ready for a half term holiday club starting on Monday.
We do have one window of respite…..we are going to watch the Rugby on Saturday evening with Kay’s brother and his girlfriend – wooohooo!!!!

Yesterday we were in Redditch at Oasis Christian Centre to do a family service.
The first most noticeable thing in this church was how much people smiled….even before the service began!
This is the church our colleagues Nick and Sarah Morgan go to. They have adopted triplets – so their hands are very full! We had the privilege of seeing one of the triplets take his very first steps during the worship time! (yes really!)
We talked about heroes and following the right hero – Jesus, and if you do follow Jesus, being a hero that points to Jesus, although we took and hour to say it with various puppets, tricks, stories and songs. (We still can’t believe Albert said his heroes were the Chuckle Brothers! But it did help us make a very good point…….!)
We’re off to Dalesdown at lunch time for a director’s meeting, and then Kay will be off to London on Tuesday for a Cheltenham Bible Festival Meeting.

Today we were at Lindsay Park Baptist Church in Kenton, London for a training day.
There were people from a few churches, some local, and one church from the other side of London!
Steve’s Subject was “Why do we do Children’s Work” (Good question!!) and Kay’s was “Managing difficult behaviour, including special needs” (Two seminars squished into one!). Kay’s seminar sparked quite a debate about the level of discipline we should use in Sunday school….until lunch intervened!!
Tomorrow we are off to The Oasis Christian Centre in Redditch to lead a family service…….

Kay put this on the Children Matter network today and we thought you might like to see it.

We’ll let you know if there are any comments back!

1 Peter 3:15 says:……. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.……….
My question is: Can our children and teenagers do that? Can many of our young leaders do that?
We spend a lot of time looking at the theology of children – and that is great, but how much time do we spend on making sure we are teaching good theology to our children?
I believe, that in an effort to make things accessible and politically correct for the children, in many cases all we have succeeded in doing is watering down vital parts of the gospel.
Over the last 10 or more years I have been told over and over again that we should not use the term “Father” when talking about God because we may upset those who, for whatever reason don’t have a Father. I firmly believe that we have done the children a huge disservice in teaching like this. Having been in children’s work for over 15 years, I have the pleasure of talking to young adults who have grown through this style of teaching. Those people where the Fatherhood of God was taught sensitively and well say that being taught God was their Father was their “saving grace”. The knowledge that God was the best dad ever, even when their own dad wasn’t around, helped them to grow in their faith with confidence. Those who had this vital piece of teaching withheld – for all the best reasons, often still struggle with relating to God in the intimate way that a father and child should relate. I know two national children’s workers who never had a father at home, but both would agree with this. One was taught about Father God and one wasn’t. The one that wasn’t regrets the fact that he wasn’t taught this. Both teach about a loving Father God where ever they go.
Within that frame work of teaching, we have correctly tried to find a way of teaching about God’s love and Jesus’ death by teaching that God/Jesus is our “special friend” or a “friend that doesn’t fall out with us”. I would like to ask; when do we move the children on from this aspect of God and teach them more? Being such an ancient Kids worker, I now have the children who were first taught in this way coming through as leaders, and find that many of them still have only that basic understanding of Jesus as friend. They have no realisation of redemption, forgiveness, and sanctification. (Yes I know they are big words!)
As these leaders have grown into adulthood, they believe that they “chose to follow God”, whereas in reality – God chose them. Their faith is based on how God makes them feel, not on the reality of repentance, redemption, sanctification or even forgiveness. They often have no understanding of who they are in Christ. The true realisation that they have authority and have been forgiven has not been fully understood. Not knowing the full extent of God love has had huge implications in their Christian walk and is bourn out by the fact that I spend a lot of time counselling children’s workers about self image, guilt and assurance. If you don’t know the truth, then the devil’s lies are harder to refute!
Like the Fatherhood of God issue, I believe our children are again being robbed of a true and full relationship with God by teaching this way.
It is these people who have only have a basic understanding of their faith who are now often responsible for teaching the next generation. I hear stories mis-told, vital facts left out or misquoted, passages taken out of context and misunderstood.
In the distant past, revivals have begun with a young child claiming that people need to repent – do our children even know what this means now?
From knowing true forgiveness there flows the knowledge of no more condemnation, the ability to forgive and accept forgiveness, and the assurance of heaven.
As our children grow physically – we move them from milk to soft food to meat. Every parent will know that when a child is faced with a huge chunk of meat – we lean over and cut it up for them – we don’t take it away and give them a sloppy milk meal instead.
I’m all for teaching the gospel in an understandable way, but we do need to make sure that we start adding meat – by cutting it up, not mushing it up!
In Latvia, where I see the full message of God’s love and sacrifice taught, and leaders who don’t shy away from teaching all of God’s truth, I find young men and women who are secure and unwavering in their faith. Coming to faith is called “repentance” there, and that phrase is explained clearly. I see young people studying God’s word, fasting and praying, expecting great things from God and seeing them happen.
No, it isn’t all perfect over there – but God is moving! And I believe the fact that the children are given the full truth – cut into little pieces – is part of the reason why.
The Bible states in John 8:32:
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Let’s set our children free!

All the Spring Harvest meetings are over – Monday evening saw us looking at the theology of the teaching theme (Set in Isaiah) in quite a lot of detail. This was very helpful, and this morning we thrashed out how to teach the children about different aspects of hope from the “exilic” chapters in Isaiah! It is a difficult theme – we will be teaching concepts with very little narrative, but I do believe the theme is really good and teachable (with a lot of wrestling and prayers for inspiration and wisdom!!!) As soon a this was over, we had lunch and then went straight into the National Children’s Ministers Retreat. This ends tomorrow after lunch, but having opted to commute each day, we now have to be back in Nuneaton for 7 am tomorrow!!
We spent the afternoon and evening sharing, praying, eating junk food, drinking coffee and playing games on a wii……our first ever attempt at this! There will be some stuff to report back by the end of the retreat – we will put it on the blog when we have it in a form we can use, with the confidential bits taken out!!!!

We are now at home after what was a brilliant training retreat. On Saturday night we had a time of quiet worship followed by prayer stations – the photo shows (In a round about way) a little of those. I couldn’t take many photos because we didn’t want to disturb people using the stations.
The paper tells you to take and eat a Jelly baby, and pray for children who suffer hurt and abuse. The bits of paper have words on them that describe what hurts these children. (Disappointment, Fatherless, Abuse etc)


Sunday morning saw one of our colleagues – Monica Cook, talking about her experiences in various countries. She inspires and amazes every one with what she does, but is so humble about it. Much of what she has done in the past is quite sensitive, so we can’t go into detail!
We had the pleasure of leading communion for the delegates – and share a little of what is on our hearts for children. We’ll probably share that in a separate blog entry later.
In an hour we will be off to a Spring Harvest meeting to look at the teaching for next year – exciting!

Day 2 of the children’s worker’s training retreat is in full swing. The photos were taken at breakfast and are the views from the dining room – beautiful isn’t it? (The last taken just out side the dining room!)

Graham Reed spoke this morning on “What is your treasure?” and challenged us about our vision, and our hopes and dreams. He went through what he called “the Vision Killers” – there were far too many nods as he went through the list!

Kay did her bit in the session on special needs – challenging the carefully held views of what children can and cannot do. She said that “we happily agree that the deaf can hear the voice of God, the Blind can see what God has done, the person in a wheel chair can dance with praise – but do we believe that the child with learning difficulties can think with the mind of Christ? When we get that heart sink feeling as the boy with autism walks in – would it change the way we approach that child if we thought in those terms: This child can think with the mind of Christ? Do we take the child and try to make them fit into the mould we have created for our kids work (A square peg in a round hole) or do we find creative ways to make the children’s work fit the child?”

In half an hour, Steve will be taking a seminar called ‘XL in leadership’. I assume they mean excel and not extra large! If they mean extra large – Steve isn’t the man to do the seminar!!

After a lovely time at Torch Trust’s Holiday and Retreat Centre (Watch this space for more info later!) we finally arrived at Dalesdown.

The First evening has been great – and hopefully a glimpse of what the rest of the weekend will be.
We were given the job of leading some worship – with some fun bits thrown in…..the photo is of Steve fulfilling this request!
John O’brian spoke from 2 Timothy 1:14, but also….as John does…..talked of what God is showing him. He inspired everyone to offer the Kingdom of God to the children: “We give them biscuits and squash, but do we offer them the way to the Kingdom?”
Last night myself and Steve were saying something very similar to each other ….maybe God’s saying something……..?!