Jesus is my Big Brother - Day 1
Spent today at St Helens Show. My Blog has been a bit quiet recently as I’ve been helping put together the SHINE Marquee along with local vicar, John Draycott (SHINE is the organisation that brings together the churches in St Helens aea). So we came up with the concept of creating a Big Brother Diary Room!
Visitors are invited to sit in the big chair and answer questions like: “How are you today?”; “How are your housemates?”; “Who do you get on with?” and “Who don’t get on with?”. Once they have contemplated that for a while they move on to the three tasks, which are basically inetractive prayer stations. You know the kind of thing - light a candle, hold a stone, write a prayer etc.
Day 1 has been pheonmenal. We did try counting visitors but it got too busy! Something like 700 people actually went in and sat on the big chair and most who did went on to do the tasks. Many other wandered trhough the tent. We have a bag full of posi-it note prayers written by folk, the content of which suggests God really used this today.
The other interesting observation is that 90% of those who went in to the diary room were under 25. Older folk tended to hover round the door and took a lot of persuading to go in! The whole Big Bother thing really hit the spot. Once in the vast majority of visitors took the tasks seriously too - hence the big bag of heart felt prayers.
This has been an amazing day. More tomorrow for Day 2…
