School Work

Once a term, most infant and junior schools on Portsea Island have a visit from our schools' assembly team. We are a mixture of people from several different churches: Langstone Church, Portsmouth Family Church, Devonshire Avenue Baptist Church and Solent Community Church, but we are all enthusiastic about sharing with the children how excited we are about the things that God has done in our lives, and the lives of others.

This is not a job for the faint-hearted! After we've lugged kilos of sound equipment through long corridors and up stairs we set up at mega speed before hundreds of children file in. We then blast them with praise songs, play interactive games, do drama, read from the Bible, share something from our lives and pray - all in the space of between 10 and 20 minutes. Often we have last minute changes, sometimes we have major catastrophies and regularly forget what we are supposed to be doing next, but always we leave with a sense of what a huge privilege it is to have the chance to teach the children in our city what we as christians believe and what an exciting book the Bible is.

We get many hilarious comments and also some unusual ones. One little boy came home from school and announced to his bemused mother that Jesus had come into his school that day!! Another child pointed to one of the team in the street and informed his mum that "That is one of Jesus' best friends!" One teacher was told by her pupil that we were an "all singing, all dancing church!". Children sing to us in the street, wave at us in shops and approach us in play parks. It can be hard to recognise all 8000 of them - but we try!!