An interesting invitation has just come in

But first a bit of a ‘prologue’.

When God first called me to minister to children, I was invited to many local Church retreats to ‘minister’ to the children.

Sadly, it did not take me long to realise that I was not really being invited to minister, but my function was to oversee their children (toddlers to teens all in one group) and try and entertain them and keep them occupied for hours on end.

This would enable the parents, who the retreat was definitely for, to spend many hours away from their children to enjoy adult teaching and worship…without being distracted.

I soon became wise to this and noticed that whilst parents were being ‘blessed’ many of their very young children were suffering from neglect by being away from both parents for such a length of time which usually went late into the night.

So, I became rather selective of the invites that I accepted and even in my seminars went as far as suggesting to children’s leaders / Sunday School teachers that if they were just being treated as baby sitters to make sure that they got paid the going rate!

But then an invitation recently appeared to do a Praise Party as part of a children’s programme at a Churches summer camp this coming July.
Without doing much research I could see that this was a Church who valued their children and were already in the process of preparing appropriate songs and planning out a teaching programme for them

So….

For the 1st time in many many years I said that I would love to and have agreed to join them to do a children’s Praise Party…but just for one hour tops!

There will be just under 100 children present with a wide age range between 3 and 11. A bit of a challenge but I think I have a wide enough variety of songs to deal with this and am planning that all the songs I do have fun actions and movement.

I think that the very young will enjoy songs like ‘the statue song’, ‘big thumbs’ and ‘I will bend down and touch my knees’, whilst I think the older ones will have fun doing ‘Bigger Barn’, ‘Wolfy Wolfy’ and learning the Makaton deaf signing to the chorus of ‘Father God I wonder’ as they sing it.
The organiser is also choosing a few of her favourite old action Scripture songs and she has plenty to choose from.

As you can see this is rather different and rather exciting to what I’ve been doing for the past few years.

Understandably some of you may think that I’m a little ancient to still be travelling around Churches doing energetic Praise Parties, after all I started doing them when I invented the Glories 45 years ago.

But most children love Grandads…so here comes ‘Grandad Ish’ and as long there is still a little spring left in my legs, a sparkle in my smile and most importantly children keep enjoying my rather ‘different’ songs…Let the Praise Parties continue!

P.S. Just between you and me, I HAVE insisted that some younger fit leaders help me out at the front by doing and teaching the actions and dances…but that is only because it’s impossible to play my guitar and wave my arms and legs around at the same time! (wink wink)

I am so looking forward to being with them.