9 MONTHS ON...

Can you believe (I find it hard to!) that Paul and I have been here at Kensington Elim for almost a year now - 3 quarters. We have seen Autumn, Winter and Spring in Liverpool and are currently enjoying Summer, with all the promise it brings. With the sunshine comes a renewed sense of vigour and excitement.

Things have been progressing in the church, and we are beginning to see growth: not just numerically, but the kind of growth that comes from people walking more closely with God. There is a strong sense of God preparing and building us up as individuals and as a family, for what He is about to do in Kensington!

There have been some lovely things happening;

We have seen the continuing slow, but steady growth of our Seedlings toddler group. We are hoping this ministry will pick up even more in September, but for now we have a lovely regular group of Mums who come and there is a friendly, welcoming atmosphere in the group.

We have run three monthly 'Family Fun Nights' ; two film evenings, a Beetle Drive and a quiz night, which have been well attended by church folk, but also people from the community. We have also run a three day holiday Bible club, for primary aged children, in the Easter holidays - which was a great success and the children really loved it. We are planning to run the club again in August - so watch this space for more details!

We have two regular house-groups running, which are a great encouragement to those

who come, and on alternate weeks we have our Tuesday Prayer meeting, which is well attended and where we have seen some positive answers to prayer.

Recently we have also begun thrice weekly early morning prayer meetings (9.30am Mon, Weds & Fri) and it is again really encouraging to have people choosing to come and pray with us, for the future of our church, family and community. We believe we have seen the impact of this sacrifice of time already begin to take hold.

Paul and I attended the Elim Leadership Summit in October, and were blessed and inspired by the teaching and ministry we received. There are so many difficult challenges that face the modern Church in this time, but ELS was a time of equipping and encouraging; inspiring us to be fervent and creative to reach the generations.

This week we had our friend Rachel Jones come and minister as a guest speaker - and God really used her. We have more guest preachers planned for the future.

There is a lot to look forward to in the coming months too;

We are a host church for 'Jesus Loves' this year and are really looking forward to blessing people, and sharing God's love with them, on the streets of Kensington this summer.

Adventure Cruise Holiday Club is happening again in August - where we get to have a crazy week sharing God's love and hope with children in the area - can't wait!

Cefn Lea family (church) retreat in North Wales at the end of August. This is called 'Ignite,' and is always a week of rich blessing and lots of laughter! It's a really great time to take stock and spiritually refuel - in a lovely setting.

And in the Autumn we are hoping to begin a 'Make Lunch' project, where we will provide hot meals for school children during the school holidays - filling the hunger gap that occurs when they don't get the free meals they would usually have in school. We are very excited about this and believe it will be an important social outreach to our community.

And I'm sure that won't be all! God is keeping us very busy.

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