The summer is approaching! You might be looking forward to some time off, a break, a trip to somewhere warmer with better food. Most church activity comes to a halt over the summer holidays, and services in August can often resemble the Marie Celeste. However, our parishes will be full of families who are struggling to find childcare for children and young people who might not have much to do all day long. Should we not be helping parents and carers, as well as creating spaces to build relationships, have fun and share our faith? Welcome to summer mission!
Holiday clubs
For decades, churches have been running holiday clubs – week-long clubs with a mix of fun, faith, games and craft for children (and perhaps young people, but it’s mainly children). There are so many benefits to running a holiday club. You can attract children who live in your parish, but aren’t part of your congregation. You can strengthen relationships with those on the fringes of your church community, you can bring young people into leadership and get your whole church behind an outreach project. It is a lot of work though, and takes a lot of resources, but there are books and programmes to help you, from Scripture Union, BRF and others.
Event days/half days
If a full holiday club is too much for your ministry at the moment, why not put on special day or afternoon events. You could provide some sports training, teaching cooking, hold craft sessions or provide a holiday-club style mix of activities, but for a shorter period of time. This can be useful if you can only recruit volunteers on specific dates in the holidays, rather than for whole weeks. If you focus on one activity (such as a particular craft or a single sport), you can get in specialists in that field who can pass on some great new skills to children, young people and families.
Hold evening events
You might be able to get more volunteers in the evenings, so this might be a better time to stage some activities. Food is always a winner, so put on a barbeque with some informal sports activities for whole families to get involved in. Film nights work well, with early evening showings for children and families and later ones for young people – choose a good film (with an appropriate certificate), put on some snacks (popcorn, always popcorn, but have a vacuum cleaner ready for the inevitable spillage) and you’re away!
Hanging around
Simply by gathering a group of volunteers in a park or playing field at the same time each day/week and starting to play games, you can attract children, young people and families to play with you!
This isn’t an exhaustive list, and none of these ideas is rocket science, but one of them might work in your context. Of course, you’ll need to put in some work to get the correct permissions, licences and checks (following your safeguarding policy), but that shouldn’t be prohibitive!
What summer events are you getting up to? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook!