Posted in Church, Craft, tagged bassoon, Bible, Children, Craft, diy, Fun, Jon Madin, Kids, Messy Church, musical instrument, rubber glove bassoon on 14 November, 2011| 3 Comments »
We had a Messy Church planning meeting in the Vicarage this morning. We’ve been thinking through the crafts for the next few months, so we can make sure we have all the materials ready. In the process we came across this great clip of Aussie music teacher Jon Madin showing you how to make a rubber glove bassoon. We are *so* going to make these. Bet you can’t guess the bible passage, mind. It was a bit of a stretch…
Posted in Church on 3 November, 2011| 4 Comments »
The folk at Come Dine with Me left a message on the blog last week:
Come Dine With Me are casting in Wolverhampton! Want the chance to show off your culinary skills and win £1000? Apply now! Email rebecca.dibley@itv.com.
But I don’t think they actually read the blog or they’d know that the chances of me hosting a civilised dinner at the Vicarage are completely zippo. I can’t think what the viewers (and other diners) would make of meal in our house. The food is generally pretty tasty (tho’ presentation leaves much to be desired) but it’s the interruptions that might prove challenging – our front doorbell rarely has a quiet night.
It might be gentlemen of the road wanting feeding, laundry doing or lifts to Birmingham, children wanting garden time or bikes mended, others in need of cups of sugar, help with the electric or merely calling to let us know about something going on in the parish. Sometimes it’s members of the Vicar’s small group coming over to study the bible, or anxious teenagers coming for extra forms for their parents to sign for a youth group outing. Or maybe it would be the chap with the small building company who brings us old fence panels as fuel for our woodburning stoves, keeping us warm and saving him landfill charges.
And that’s just the front door. The phone sometimes goes too… So I don’t think I’ll be responding to Rebecca Dibley. If you’re near Wolves you could though.
Posted in Church, Kids, tagged All Age Services, assemblies, Church, homemade, Kids, plumbing, puppeteering, puppets, PVC pipes, School, theatre on 2 September, 2011| 5 Comments »
This week I finally put into action a project that I’ve been wanting to organise ever since our friends the Rocks showed us their fantastic puppet theatre constructed from PVC plumbing pipes. After a bit of internet research we decided that we’d try and make a fairly large theatre, as we usually have two puppets in the sketches that we do in church and school.
A quick trip to our local plumber’s merchants and £34 later (after they gave us a special discount) and we had the piping for a theatre that’s about 2m high at the back, 1.4m at the front (for a kneeling adult or standing child) and 1m deep. Our plumber’s merchant didn’t advise gluing the thin-walled 32mm piping we had, so we had to cut small joining pieces to connect the T-pieces and 90 degree bends.
Yesterday morning we had one of our holiday Cake and Chat sessions. These are pretty much the same as the ones in term time, except they start later (for holiday lie-ins) and we have more kids with us. So we took all the pipes and connecting pieces down to the church hall, together with a couple of hacksaws, and got down to work. Rocky was the man with the saw, and we had a team which included his fiancee Bee and her mum, and various children who particularly enjoyed applying washing up liquid to the joints to make it easier to connect the pipes in.
Once we’d assembled everything, we found that the frame was still a little wobbly (especially at the beginning when we were still missing the strut for the middle of the front). We will be applying some silicone (the sort you use to line the side of the bath) to the T-pieces, which should stop the rotation that caused the wobble by fixing the connectors to the pipes.
Bee and her mum have kindly offered to make some proper curtains (today’s were a random selection from my materials box) and also a kit bag to carry the rather unwieldy piping, so we are hoping to have everything looking pukka in the next couple of weeks. I’ll blog the first official appearance of the theatre so you can see the final product.
Posted in Alcohol, Church, Inner city, tagged alcoholism, betel, Frosty Jack, homelessness, Inner city, probation, rehabilitation, tramp on 1 September, 2011| 7 Comments »
We were not only greeted by a scraggy old flytipped sofa in our drive on our return home last week. As we unloaded the kids, the camping gear and wet swimming towels from the car, we also spotted a couple of items which made us think that we might soon again be seeing Gone, our on/off doorstep lodger.
The traditional bottle of Frosty Jack in our flowerbed
We were proved right the next morning, when he sat on our doorstep until lunchtime and tried to persuade the Vicar to ‘do just one small thing’ for him (take him out to McDonalds). After our previous experiences with Gone, we now say that we will take him to Betel to start rehabilition, but that is all we will do for him. Anything else seems only to sustain his destructive lifestyle and terrible cycle of living rough followed by living at Her Majesty’s pleasure. In the meantime, he’s back in our drive, sometimes singing loudly at 6am, sometimes aggressive, sometimes sad and wanting to talk. Pray that we are able to treat him with grace as his behaviour seems so intractable, and pray that his self-destruction stops.
Some information that Gone is too far gone to really make use of...
Posted in Church, Vicar's wife job description, tagged Christian, Church, CofE, encouragement, faith, five ways, help, list, minister's wife, Ministry, parish, Vicar's wife on 14 July, 2011| 19 Comments »
A lovely parishioner visited me yesterday and brought a bunch of flowers, knowing that I’d had a pretty stressful few days. Sometimes being the Vicar’s wife can feel lonely. You’re in a weird situation that not many people understand and people keep on calling at your front door asking the Vicar to mend their bikes (amongst other things last night). So when someone from our congregation thinks of me and lets me know they’ve been thinking of me, it really warms my heart. A little encouragement goes a long way and helps me to persevere.
And then a Vicar’s wife friend on Facebook asked for some help in drafting a talk on ‘Five Ways to Encourage a Minister’s Wife’ (she’s not just speaking to Anglicans). There were lots of great ideas there – and they’ve inspired me to write my five:
r praying for her (maybe in writing).Many of these things would encourage any church member, but I’ve tried to highlight some of the things I’ve found especially encouraging myself. What do you think?
Posted in Church, Inner city, tagged bikes, bomb, cannabis, cars, Church, church hall, community, crime, dealing, drugs, Immigration, Inner city, news, Police, raid, Rolls Royce, Semtex, suspicious package, theft on 1 July, 2011| 1 Comment »
We had some excitement in the parish today – a ‘suspicious package’ was found in a house just round the corner that was being raided for drugs. Residents in houses close to the raided property were evacuated, and we were asked if we could accommodate them in the church hall.
So we were there with the teapots and some biscuits, on and off all morning, whilst we all speculated about what was happening. I quite enjoyed myself – particularly because I met a couple of neighbours that we’d not previously had the chance to speak to. It was a bit of a pain for them, though – one friend was without her diabetic medication, another lady had her two young children with her, but not their toys, people needed to get their cars to get to work. Most folk took the opportunity to go shopping in town but returned later to hang around and chat at the end of the street or pop into the hall for more refreshments.
Finally, after about 31/2 hours, we were told that people could go home. I stayed behind in the hall to tidy up and the local PCSO and his Sergeant came and chatted. Turns out the suspicious package wasn’t Semtex, as had been suspected, but something to do with with preparation of drugs. They seized cannabis wraps from the property and made three arrests. More drug dealing – the house next door to that one was raided a few weeks ago and seizures made for the same thing. I reckon you could probably raid a couple of houses on every street in this parish and find evidence of drug use or dealing.
The police were quite cheery, as these arrests were made on top of two successful operations locally earlier this week. A house just opposite the church was raided and found to contain a stolen motorbike and 27 stolen bicycles. And only last night they carried out some checks with immigration officials. They found illegal immigrants, but also some dodgy vehicles that were being stripped down, including a vintage Rolls and a BMW that had been nicked from Police HQ.
So a good week for clamping down on crime – well done to our local coppers. It does make you wonder what’s happening behind closed doors when the police aren’t calling. And makes us pray for this broken parish all the more.
Posted in Church, tagged 2 Chronicles, Calvary Church Children, Children, Christian, Church, colouring pages, crafts, Deaf Missions, Jehoshaphat, Junior Church, Kids, kings, lectionary, On The Way, online, puzzles, Sunday school, Teachers Direct, teaching, TNT, wide age range, wordsearch on 21 June, 2011| 5 Comments »
I have recently started leading regularly at our Junior Church. When I began, we were using materials which were tailored to a narrow age range and which were tied to the lectionary and sometimes seemed to miss the point of the passage.
Since our group has an age range of 3-14 and we don’t follow the lectionary in church, we have now switched to using On The Way for 3-9s. Although this still misses the top age range we have, it caters for a greater number of the children, and also enables us to design our own programme of teaching.
On The Way has excellent craft resources and helps you to get into the passage you’re teaching yourself. It doesn’t, however, always help you to prepare the teaching of the passage very easily. At the moment we are doing a little series on some of the kings of Judah, which has been great for me as some of the passages were unfamiliar to me, let alone to the kids!
So to help me to tell the stories of some of the passages (and to source some good colouring pages for less well-known stories) I now turn to Deaf Missions – their daily reading notes are available online and give some excellent short summaries of bible passages together with clear black and white illustrations which blow up very well for colouring in. Check out their page on Jehoshaphat and Ahab to see what I mean.
I always like to have a colouring page and a wordsearch for the children – sometimes I like to get them to colour in a picture as I explain the bible passage, as it can help with concentration. And it’s always useful to have something up your sleeve in case the Vicar preaches too long and you’re in Junior Church for an unplanned extra ten minutes.
DLTK have a good selection of colouring pages. For wordsearches I tend to go to Calvary Church‘s site first – they also have colouring pages on many passages and other word puzzles, although the bible version they use (possibly the American Standard?) doesn’t usually mesh with the readings we use, so I don’t use the more complex puzzles. If the passage isn’t in the Calvary Church curriculum, I go to Teachers Direct, where you can make your own wordsearches – cool, eh? Unsurprisingly I used this when teaching about Jehoshaphat.
Do you have any favourite online places for Sunday School resources? Do share!
Posted in Books, Church, Faith, Teenagers, tagged 11-14, activity, Books, Books for camp, bookstall, camp, Catherine House, Children, Christian, Christian Focus, CPAS, faith, friendship, Pathfinders, reading, School Survival, Teenagers, venture, young people, youth group on 13 June, 2011| Leave a Comment »
In my quest for suitable books for the young people on our Pathfinder venture this summer, I picked up School Survival by Catherine and Louise House. Louise is Catherine’s school age daughter and some of this book is based on the experiences she had when she moved school. And although it’s called School Survival, it’s particularly about friendship and working that through, with a single chapter about starting in a new school. It is very suitable for the Pathfinder age group (11-14) as it covers many issues faced as young people move on to secondary school.
The book is a combination of stories, quizzes, activities and bible study and is split into 14 chapters, including ones on making friends, bullying, gossip, prayer and church. It might be suitable for a Year Six primary school leaver to study over the summer holidays, or for family devotions or even as an outline for a church Pathfinder group to study over a few weeks (the chapters are uneven in size, so some could be combined). I’ll be ordering a few copies for our camp bookstall.
Posted in Church, Faith, tagged aliens, All Age Services, Big Words that end in SHUN, Children, Church, Colin Buchanan, Doctrine Who, Dr Who, family services, Fun, illustrations, Kids, Super Saviour, tardis on 6 June, 2011| 18 Comments »
All age services are a great way for families to worship together, but it can be a real challenge to keep them fresh and accessible. This weekend we began a new series for our monthly All Age gatherings. We are going through Colin Buchanan’s great song ‘Big Words that end in SHUN’, from his Super Saviour album, teaching a big word each month:
Big words that end in SHUN!
Show us what the Lord has DONE!
Through Jesus, His own SON!
Big words, Big words that end in SHUN!Revela-‐SHUN!
God shows himself to us
Substitut-‐SHUN!
Jesus takes our place
Salva-‐SHUN!
Sinners saved from hell
Big words, Big words that end in SHUNPropitia-‐SHUN!
God’s anger turned away
Justifica-‐SHUN!
Just like we’d never sinned
Imputa-‐SHUN!
Jesus’ righteousness is mine
Big words, Big words that end in SHUNResurrec-‐SHUN!
Raised from death to life
Redemp-‐SHUN!
Sinners bought by God
Adop-‐SHUN
Sinners made God’s sons
Big words, Big words that end in SHUN
This Sunday we tackled REVELA-SHUN and the Vicar spoke on Hebrews 1:
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…
So the Vicar decided that we could get Dr Who to come and take us back to meet a few of the prophets to find out what they had to say. Suddenly plans were afoot for the construction of a tardis and the Queen, the Joker and the Engineer were very pleased to spend a day in half term wielding paintbrushes.
Tardis construction in the back yard of the Vicarage
Once it was painted, the Joker decided that our tardis should be manned by Doctrine Who. And so here is the finished item in our front drive, being shown off by Doctrine Who and an enemy (although my knowledge of Dr Who isn’t sufficient to tell you which enemy it is). It went down very well on Sunday morning, and is now installed in the boys’ bedroom, where time-travelling adventures continue.
Doctrine confounds an alien
Posted in Church, tagged Church, fountain pen, indelible ink, ink, ISO 12757-2, legal documents, marriage, marriage certificate, ordination training, registers, registrar's ink, Staedtler, vicar, wedding on 24 May, 2011| 24 Comments »
Last week I made the unhappy discovery that the Vicar is meant to write his marriage registers in indelible ink. It’s obvious when you think about it – you don’t want your marriage certificate to fade after a few years, but unfortunately we hadn’t thought about it and hadn’t had it pointed out either. This information wasn’t included in ordination training, nor in the diocesan training for curates (as far as the Vicar remembers, anyway). Thankfully (and rather sadly), in our sort of parish there aren’t many marriages at all and those that there are aren’t often in church, so not too many documents were filled out in evil biro before we discovered this.
Having found out about the need for the special ink, I made some enquiries and have the following information for anyone else who is similarly underinformed about writing legal documents:
Hopefully this blogpost will prevent the writing of a few registers in dodgy ink in the future. I suspect that as the number of church weddings continues to decrease, clergy will be less familiar with this requirement and fading ink registers may become more numerous.
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