August 2011

Back in July our church held a great Ladies Night that would be really easy to replicate so here’s what we did.
Venue: we used a local Workers Club
Time: Friday eve 8pm -10pm – we deliberately pitched it late so it was obvious it was not a children’s thing. This was to be time out for mums/girls/working women
Title: Creative Night Out for the Girls
Strap-line: ‘Making, Baking, Taking Care of yourself’
We had the room laid out with lots of small tables to sit around with drinks with nice table decorations (there was a bar so we didn’t have to do drinks). Then we had a series of activities that our guests could choose to join in with or not.
Our activities were: card-making, someone gifted at this brought lots of stuff and allowed people to just ‘have a go’. We also did cake decorating, partiuclarly sugar craft shapes for decorating cup-cakes. We provided all the materials and people just ‘had a go’. Someone else brought a sewing machine and all the stuff for making lavender bags, this was very popular. Some else offered free facials, then in another corner we put on a DIY nail bar where groups of freinds could paint each others nail. One group of ladies from the church made lots of tray bakes so there free nibbles for everyone to enjoy. Finally we invited a local slimming group in who offered to do free 1-2-1 consultations giving people their BMI’s and body fat anaylis as well as free nutritional advice.
GENIUS IDEA: we wanted to give away free goody bags, to bless our guests but we had almost no budget. So we blagged 30 free large paper carriers from Costa Coffee (actually they were very obliging) and took these to church a few weeks ahead of time, we asked all the women at church to take one or two bags and fill it with 3 or 4 items that people might like to receive. Our goody bag fillers were really creative and almost everybody had things lying around such as unwanted gifts they were happy to put in the bags eg skin creams and smellies, cotton wool packs, notebooks, pens, photo frame, nail varnish etc. All the goody bags came back on the night and we added a Liberti magazine to each one (new Women’s Christian magazine) Because we didn’t have goody bags to give one to every guest, we gave out FREE raffle tickets as people arrived and then called the raffle at the end of the evening. This meant everyone stayed for the 5 minutes talk about life being mind, body and soul and that God cares for every part of our life.
The whole evening was easy to put on, the emphasis was on taking part not on spending money so we had very little there for anyone to buy. We wanted to simply create an occasion that offered something a little more than just a night out for the girls.
You could do this! Have fun

If I was to ask you how often you truly spent time with God, alone, what would you reply? If I was then to ask you, do you relish those times or are they more of a burden, what would you reply? On a basic level I think everyone of us has days or weeks when getting ‘time-out’ to be in God’s presence is tough and sometimes it takes more discipline than revelation. Being part of an accountability group has been an eye-opener- I am not alone in this area of our faith. But it is something that we all want to perfect and dwell in daily.

One of the books I have read recently has really developed and inspired how I enjoy and look at spending my quiet times each day. ‘Sacred Pathways: Discover your Soul’s Path to God’ by Gary Thomas, is a book which is practical, easy and an enjoyable read that will make you discover how you tick when it comes to spending quiet time alone with God. The book ventures through nine sacred pathways which lead us to thrive on the simple things in life and turn them into praise whilst also finding our unique Gethsemane’s – places where we can escape to in our busy everyday lives.

Would you call yourself a Traditionalist in your style of worship, in that everything needs to remain structuralised, or would you think yourself as more of a Naturalist in that nothing brings you more pleasure, or enthuses you to worship, than being in God’s ever-changing masterpiece? Well, who says you can’t be a bit of both? Reading this book will enlighten you as to how spending time-out with God need never be a burden or a discipline again. It will open your eyes to those around you, realising why we are all different and that there is beauty in the way others worship too.

Psalm 139 is a famous passage and one of my all time favourites, which reminds us of how unique we are in God’s sight and how there is no place we can flee from His presence. Gary Thomas has mastered nine profound ways in which we can thoroughly embrace time alone with God and rejoice in our being His children without our ritualistic tendencies.

Dare to be different. Dare to care. Dare to be a disciple of Christ.