~Outreach to Morley!~

We’re back at Capernwray and the count-down to the end of school! School ends in 9 days, March 19^th, and it feels like the end very quickly approaching!

We just got from outreach late Sunday night. I was on a team of 12 students that went to a small town of 60,000 called Morley which is a suburb of Leeds (the 3^rd largest city in England?). I had a great experience with our team, with our hosts and with the town.

Capernwray divided our 170 students into 26 teams and sent us all over the UK (most were in England). My team was composed of 9 girls and 3 boys (a good representation of our ratio here at school). One of the main events (and my favorite) which we participated in over outreach was a “Bible Exhibition”. We did this when we were split into our 2 sub-teams so we had 6 of us dress up as Bible characters. We worked with an evangelist who works with Open Air Missions. He worked as the narrator, weaving our stories together. We would each share a story with the school children from our characters life as an interactive monologue. We performed for school groups 8 (I think) times for a combined total of about 600 kids!

Here's our entire team (my sub-team is dressed up in our Bible costumes) along with some of our friends from our host church. The man on the farthest right was our narrator. The woman with the little girl in front of her is the pastor's wife and her husband, the pastor, is standing right behind her with the grayish hair. I stayed at their house for the duration of outreach. They were very sweet and I enjoyed being at a house with a little girl. =)

Anyway, back to the exhibition.

I was the prophet Elijah and told the story of God’s miracle on Mt. Carmel. In short, God proved that He is a contemporary God and active in our lives by supernaturally setting a drenched sacrifice (a dead bull) on fire from heaven! I loved telling that story and felt the kids really enjoyed the dramatic fire aspect of the story. I certainly enjoyed telling it and acting it out! =) I would ask the kids certain questions that would make them think about the story, i.e. I asked them “what effect does water have on fire?” the obvious answer is that it puts it out! Then I proceeded to tell how I (Elijah) poured buckets of water on the sacrifice (what I was about to have God burn) in order to show the unlimited and extremity of God’s power! (if you want to read the story, see 1 Kings 18)

The Bible Exhibition took up approximately 2 days of our time.

Here I am performing as Elijah.

God actually sent an unexpected gift through working in the exhibition. Our narrator, John, brought an assistant/apprentice with him named Daniel. We knew Daniel would be coming, but were pleasantly surprised when he turned out to be 19 like most of us (no one on my team is older than 20). It was great to have another male on our team, much less a kind, godly young man. He ended up being quite a blessing to our team.

Other outreach activities included leading the church service for our host church twice, leading the Sunday service for another church in the area, hosting kids’ club after school, having tea with elderly people in an effort to have meaningful conversations with them, passing out free gifts from the church to the public (such as calendars and diaries with Scripture on them) and performing assemblies.

We performed/ lead school assemblies for British public schools. In England, it is actually the law that children receive some sort of Christian education daily. Most schools do this in the form of assemblies. They assemble multiple classes and have a large “religious education” class. (they abbreviate it “RE”). So we went into several schools and performed a skit telling the parable that Jesus tells about the lost sheep and the loving shepherd that goes out of his way to search for this small, single sheep. (symbolic of God, our Loving Shepherd who loves all of us so much that He finds us and shows us the way when we are lost) We also made this skit interactive to keep the kids attention and they loved it! One of my team members took a video of us performing it (I played the part of the lost sheep) so you will get to see it when I get home. =)
Here we are introducing ourselves to the children during the after school children's club.

There is much more to tell, but since the internet is about to turn off here, I'll stop here for now.
I wish you all the best!
Praying for you all in England,
Sarah =)