Messy and powerful!

Our May Messy Church at SBC was on the topic of the Holy Spirit. This can be a difficult concept to try and explain so we focussed on the suggested plan of God's power to change things. This worked well building on from the concept of new life and God's love at Messy Easter.

We have found that it works best for us doing the celebration first (after the welcome, refreshment and registration) and we always kick off with a "Search the Church" activity where they look for something that is to do with the theme of the session. 

After seeing a few different ideas about explaining the Holy Spirit we went for using popcorn!

(See Flame:Creative Children's Ministry blog for more inspiration!)

"A piece of corn on it's own, is not very exciting is it? Not very tasty and not much fun to share but let’s see what happens when we add power to it? (At this point we fired up the popcorn maker which started changing the corn to popcorn as it heated up) It becomes something awesome, tasty and fun and worth sharing with others. The corn is like us created by God with the potential to be amazing, when we add God’s power to our lives we change to become what God created us to be. We can then share this so others can get to know God too."

We also used a fan to talk about how we couldn't see the air but we could see it's effects on our clothes, hair and feel it on our skin. God's spirit is the same, we can't see it but we can see and feel it's effects. The scene was then all set for the activities based on change and power. More details about what we did are available by looking at our Activities Plan which you can download if you wish! The weather was awful and we were a bit down on team so we did have to adapt/postpone some of the activities but there was still plenty to do!

Here's a taster of just some of them.

Changing bottles

Windmill

Bubble painting

Butter making

Magnet fun

Superhero lollipop

Goop

The whole event was finished off with jacket potatoes, sausages and beans followed by ice cream! It was a real privilege to lead another Messy Church with such a great team and have the opportunity to share something of God's kingdom with those that came.

God's power + Us = Awesomeness!

Making friends assembly

Finger friends!

Making friends was the topic that we recently took an assembly on and here's what we came up with.

We started off with looking at the latest craze of friendship band making - have you seen these? My girls are making them like crazy for all their buddies. You get them in a packet that looks like a bag of brace elastics and then you kind of finger crochet them together! It was good to link it to something they were familiar with!

We talked about you don't just make friends by giving someone a bracelet, there is more to it than that. But how do we make friends? I found this idea here and adapted it to use real ingredients. We asked for a volunteer and dressed them as a chef and added one ingredient at a time to 'make a friend'! 

This was a lot of fun as we added each ingredient we talked about what they meant to to ensure all ages understood the concepts, giving an example of each. It looked pretty grim by the end!

We then said that perhaps that wasn't really the best way to make a friend! Then we told the story of two best friends in the Bible - David and Jonathan, the ultimate BFF's. 

Jonathan helped David escape from his father King Saul by putting David first.

We linked the story to the 'making a friend' ingredients, pointing out that David and Jonathan's friendship had all those key elements and asked again how do we make friends? The key point of the assembly being . . .

THE BEST WAY TO MAKE A FRIEND IS TO BE A FRIEND!

We did plan to play this youtube clip of Michael Buble singing "You've got a friend in me"  to Toy Story clips as they were leaving but we ran out of time!

Let me know if you use this resource and how you got on! Enjoy!