What do you get if you take a church who wants reach its local community, a great team of people who love Jesus and a community full of all ages looking for things to do during a rainy summer holiday?
You get the Beacon Family Festival!
Monday 3rd August saw the launch of the 2008 Beacon Family Festival, a week of community outreach and family fun, for the third year based at the newly built Beacon Centre, St Mellons ... and despite the weather most of the events were able to go ahead as planned!
Pastor Steve said “The Beacon Family Festival has been an annual event for the Beacon Church for over 10 years now. With the Hope 08 theme during this year, it was an ideal opportunity to continue the festival this year and with the help of a team from Holy Nation church in London, we had a fantastic week. St Mellons is area in Cardiff which has a mixture of social and private housing. St Mellons is still any area of many social challenges but we are excited about the changes that have taken place over the last 10 years and we believe the church has played an important in that change over the years.”
The afternoons provided a whole host of activities from singing, dancing and DJ workshops, a sports programme and skate ramps in the car park, craft activities and a bouncy castle for the younger children while their mums had a cup of coffee. Wednesday afternoon we joined forces once again with other local organisations and Council children’s workers to celebrate National Play Day with around 200 people attending. Some of the highlights were a climbing wall and bouncy castle, and indoors we had crafts, displays and refreshments … it didn’t rain!! On Thursday to Saturday mornings we had the Children’s Holiday Bible Club, on the theme of Olympics with over 60 children attending in total.
In the evenings we had an number of activities, the Thursday and Friday evenings being the highlights. A Pamper Evening was dedicated to blessing the local ladies with facials, foot and hand massage and manicures. This gave many opportunities for conversations, to build relationships and to speak about the love of God.
Then on the Friday evening, the last evening, we had a “St Mellons Got Talent” night with around 140 adults and children turning up to hear a mixture of Christian and non-Christian music and dance performed by children from the community and team members. Young people and children who had attended the workshops in the week had the opportunity to showcase their talents, and all had the opportunity to vote for the act of their choice. The atmosphere was positive and exciting and again, built on personal relationships with the people who live in the environs of the church.
We had fantastic help from a team of ten from Holy Nation AOG Church in London and others who returned to help us for the week, as well as our own church guys lending a hand.
We ended the week with a family service with dance, music and Pastor Steve doing a 10 minute talk on how God can restore even the most broken of lives.
Steve added “much of the week is about building relationships and it has been great yet again to see God working in the lives of team members and the local community. Our desire is be salt and light to a community that needs to know that there is a God who loves them passionately and that there is a group of people who care about them. Our desire is that this would open doors for us to tell them more about Jesus.”
Pastor Steve Harris
steve.harris@beaconchurch.org.uk
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