August 2009

A couple of years ago I went along to an Activate day conference at St Mark’s Church in Haydock. One of the activities which were demonstrated was “bath bomb” making, and the ladies who led the workshop explained how this could be used as an evangelical outreach tool. I thought this was a great idea, and planned to introduce our ladies group to “bath bombs” as soon as possible!
However, as is sadly so often the case, the weeks went by and I didn’t get around to it. On the odd occasions that I remembered the idea, I checked out the price of the materials we would need and it seemed like a large outlay of money would be involved. We prefer not to charge for any of our outreach events so this would have been costly. And so, our bath bombs “fizzled out”.

Earlier this year, our weekly ladies group was looking for an idea for an outreach event. We try to organise something once a term and last Easter we held a chocolate night called “Ready, Steady, Taste!” which involved lots of chocolate eating, sharing recipes and a chocolate-themed gospel message at the end. It was great fun, but none of us could look at a bar of Dairy Milk for quite some time afterwards! We wanted to do something similar, but without the calories and I started to think about the bath bombs again…some well-known shops sell chocolate-flavoured bath bombs, why couldn’t we make some? Again, though, the expense involved seemed prohibitive.

I logged on to the Activate website for some inspiration and was amazed when I saw a forum post entitled “Win a bath bomb kit”! Turned out that another member had used the same idea with her women’s group and had now moved on to other things, leaving a large box of supplies unused. I quickly got in touch with Mandy, and she very kindly agreed to let us have the materials. I bought a few extra chocolate-flavoured oils and away we went!

We called our night “Bath Bombs and Bubbles”, and handed out sophisticated fizzy drinks to all the ladies on the way in. We set up two tables, one for making bath bombs and another for making bath salts (which are actually much cheaper and easier to make) and everyone got stuck in, with guidance from myself and another lady from our group who has a gift for crafts. There was only one lady from outside the fellowship who came along, but some ladies who don’t usually attend our women’s group were there too so we had a great mixture of people.

It was difficult to stop the ladies concocting their bath delights at the end of the night, but I managed to pull it together with a short message about Esther, who was pampered beyond anything we can imagine to get her ready for the king. But her real beauty came from within, and was God-given.

Now that we are all skilled in making bath bombs we are hoping to repeat the evening sometime in the future on a slightly larger scale and invite more non-Christians.
We had a lot of fun, none of which would have been possible without God’s guidance and provision. I pray that the women who came will remember the message as well as the fun.

(If anyone would like basic information on making bath bombs, or copies of the flyers and “recipe booklets” I used, you can contact me and I’ll email them to you.)