The Morgan-Gurrs

We seem to have worn a path between Leicester and the south coast in the last two months! Not all of our trips made it onto the diary page – but if you’ve been following us on twitter, you will have seen what we’ve been up to. For now, we’ll just concentrate on two of the things we’ve done since our last blog:

The Hand in Hand conference was great! We had a lot of good conversations, met a lot of good friends and enjoyed the variety of everything that was going on. The exhibition had been extended this year – so too many opportunities to part with money!

The Children Worldwide conference was a hit – team from all over the country converging on the lovely Dalesdown Centre. Our theme was “Something to Celebrate”. We were celebrating the 20th anniversary of Dalesdown being open for guests, but also celebrating the work we do, us as human beings and the children we work with. We had party bags filled with goodies, a party with children’s party food (The candy worms in the jelly were a particular hit!), and a speaker who could speak to the members from the heart – encouraging them and building them up.

Coming up – we’ll be in Kidderminster this weekend doing the children’s work for a church from Oxford who are having their church weekend away. We’ll then be rushing back to make sure we are in time to give a short presentation about our work to our home church on Sunday evening.

Not long after that we’ll be handing the house back to our house sitters once again, and flying out to Latvia.

Keep checking the twitter updates on the right ➔

Oh dear – we do seem to be bad at updating our blog! But we try to keep the twitter updates going – viewable on the right –>

The European puppet and Creative Arts Ministry Festivals were great. We loved working with the One Way team – they were welcoming, friendly and a delight to be around. The seminars we did appeared to be well received too.

The Children Worldwide Management meetings went well – much was discussed, decisions were made…. and a lot of work created for us and our Dalesdown based team.

Kay’s Meeting in London (Spring Harvest 2012 consultation day) was worthwhile – we wait to see the results of much brainstorming!

This week we have two assemblies at a local school (St.Johns), and a church club at our own church. Then on Saturday we will be doing a training day for the Yorkshire School of Christian Ministry in Otley.

We do ‘tweet’ on twitter with regular updates, but if you’re more of a Facebook person, we have a Facebook page. If you ‘like’ the page, then you will get our updates in your news feed (with more info than you get on here, as the updates are often live!)

We went on holiday for the last two weeks of September, came back and hit the ground running! We’ve had so much going on we have barely had time to anything on our blog other than keep the twitter updated.

Things don’t seem to be quietening down yet either – we are busily preparing for the One way UK European puppet & creative Arts Ministry festivals in Derby and Wokingham, where we will be delivering five workshops at each venue. This will be rapidly followed by Children Worldwide management meetings at Dalesdown.

Do keep an eye on the twitter feed, or if you do Facebook – we have a page there too!

We’ve temporarily taken twitter off the blog, but hope to have it back on very soon. In the meantime, if you want to see our twitters, just open a twitter account and request to follow us: kaymorgangurr  or stevemorgangurr

There is a little more news we haven’t got around to telling our blog followers……

Kay has taken on two other voluntary roles, using her other skills in working with those who have special needs.

Children Worldwide is now an associate with Churches for All, and Kay will be attending their partner’s meetings as a specialist in working with children who have special needs. Take a look at their website by clicking on their name, and also at the enabling church conference, advertised on the page or down load the flier here. Kay is one of the speakers.

Spring Harvest approached Kay a while ago to be their advisor on disability and special needs. She said yes and this is now official! The biggest problem with this role is tying up diaries for meetings as we’re all very busy.

Keep checking the twitters……

In the busy time of preparing and doing camps, we seem to have forgotten to update the blog……again!

The camps were great! Week one of Hungarton went very smoothly. We were taking the morning sessions, and Steve was helping with the music in the evening sessions too. Kay was also doing her usual health and safety role as well as being nurse and dishing out the daily medications and bandaging up our very few injured campers.

For the morning meetings, we were looking at the Hebrew names of God. The meetings were lively and fun with a hands on application at the end to help the children to put into action something of what they had learnt.

On week two, we had very different roles – and were there to serve the rest of the team. Kay was once again the nurse and was kept busy with a few rope swing accidents, but was also the technical person running the sound and audio visual desks, and one of the photographers for the week.

Steve was kept busy in lots of ways, and eventually led the worship in the evening meetings.

The picture is of our home for the two weeks of Hungarton camp……. (Later I’ll put a slide show of some of the photos we’re allowed to put on line from camp…..)

From Hungarton we went down to the Children’s camp at Dalesdown, not to lead, but just to be an encouragement to the team. It was a brilliant camp – and Steve got to dress up as a gorilla to collect a ransom for a kidnapped leader of camp! It was great to catch up with campers that we have built a good relationship with over the years and to see how much they have grown in many areas of their lives. Steve also led a guitar teaching session for the campers during one of their rotational activity afternoons. Many thanks to the lovely Sarah Covington for leading the camp, and to the other amazing leaders who worked so hard over all three weeks.

This was the third week of the camps there – all of which appear to have been a success (Especially judging by the facebook entries of the campers – who were all very enthusiastic!!) Many thanks to Carl Smith and Nigel Thomas for leading Teens plus – their last year for leading this camp. Ellie and Luke will be taking over for next year. Also Thanks to Paul Davis and Jo Sharp for leading the teens week – hard work but worth it!

We had a good time on Sunday morning at Sheddingdean Baptist church leading their all age service and celebrating their 11th anniversary with them. The service was followed by a church lunch – a notable affair due to a lack of quiche! Strangely, the meal was over quite quickly as folk, for some reason, wanted to get back home to watch some sporting thing on the telly….. not sure what that was, or if it was worth it…….!

Monday was a day of meetings, but we did manage an hour sitting on the beach between meetings!

Thankfully we are now based back in Leicester for a while – with a few visitors and visits to other places dotted around.

In the next few weeks we’ll be finalising our teaching for camp, finishing a couple of writing projects and updating some documentation for various people we work with, as well as attending/helping with training for camps and planning for various other activities  over the summer.

Since our last update we have been up and down the motorway to the south like a yo-yo!

It started with an all age service at our favourite local C of E church – St. Luke’s. This was a last minute booking, but we had a small gap and were more than happy to oblige. After a gobbled lunch we headed down south for a Dalesdown camps planning meeting on the Monday, squeezing in another meeting whilst we were down there. The following Friday we were back again, this time at Pilgrim Hall for a church weekend with Holy Trinity from Tulse Hill. This was both challenging and enjoyable, and we thoroughly enjoyed working with a team of our Children Worldwide friends.

Then on the following Thursday we were back again – this time for meetings, and the fund raising weekend at Dalesdown. On Friday night we had the wonderful Jonathan Veira doing his one man show, and a great time was had by all whilst raising money for our new sports hall. On Saturday, Dalesdown was opened up for a free family fun day. Well over a thousand people came through the doors over the course of the day. There were tons of activities to do and lots of fattening foods to eat, again – all in the name of raising money for the new sports hall.

On Saturday we’ll be back again – doing an all age service at Sheddingdean Baptist Church on the Sunday Morning, helping them to celebrate their 11th anniversary, and then staying on for more meetings on Monday. But before that, we have a Children Worldwide management meeting in Birmingham on Thursday.

Sorry if you have been ‘badgered’ for a username and password when you came to visit the blog! This was due to Kay protecting her tweets. Some rather unsavoury people were trying to follow her on twitter and she was getting a little fed up of them. She hadn’t thought that it would stop the people she wants to see her twitters being able to.
All back to normal now!

Or should that be thankyou God for home groups?!

We’ve had three Sundays away from our home church, and will be away for a further three before we make it back. Thankfully we have been able to make our home group meetings. (Looking at Missional Church – click here to see a youtube clip on what that is!)

Please pray for us during these weeks, that we remain ‘fed’ and refreshed spiritually as we give out to those we minister to.