Starting with the youngest members of the town, we have a toddler group called Sparkles which runs on three mornings during the week. Sparkles has been running for over 10 years at the New Generation Centre. In the last few years a music & movement group (Singing Sparkles) for pre-school children has been running on Friday mornings, this has now grown to three sessions!
School age children are catered for by ‘HQ’, our Sunday children’s church and mid-week after school club. They run these weekly activities, plus school holiday trips and Christmas events.
We also work into our local schools, often taking assemblies at local primary schools. we are involved in coaching a football team at aour local primary School, Birkbeck.
Talking of football, there is also New Gen FC, which has been going for quite some time, and involves church members, and those who are not yet.
The youth congregation, Free60, also run monthly events in the local youth centre, and ‘lounge’ events with activities, chill out and pizza. The Free60 girls often get together and provide ‘Intoxic8’, a girl’s only event. And their cell groups are regularly serving us by gardening, clearing rubbish, washing cars, and loads more. Recently some of the mid week small groups went out giving gifts of chocolates on Halloween night, to very surprised local residents, who were expecting the usual ‘trick or treat.’
The Free60 congregation is also involved with The WorX Project, our youth charity. Work in this area has recently stepped up with the arrival of the The WorX Bus, a gift from Bexley’s Early Years Department. This goes out at least once a week to an area of Sidcup, and provides a hang out, PS2s, activities, nail painting, DVDs and loads more.
The New Generation Centre, as well as being a busy place full of children for most of the week, also hosts Police Sector meetings, Neighbourhood Watch meetings, Sidcup Town Partnership meetings, children’s parties and many other forums and gatherings. And we give our best in the hospitality, really going over the top in serving these areas of our community.
Our reach into the community also shapes itself as our two week summer event ‘Lark in the Park’, which has been running for 11 years, it is in the last week of July and first week of August in a prestigious Sidcup park location. Every year the outreach, profile, and attendance to this event has grown, and this year really blew our expectations. 2004 was great and seemed hard to beat, especially when we nominated for and won the ‘Faith Groups’ award during the London Week of Peace in September 2004! This is amazing; we were nominated by Bexley’s Borough Commander, and were presented the award by the Government Office for London. A great achievement for years of hard work. But 2005 saw a record number of children attend HQ and Sparkles, with over 1,300 registered!
We work hard at bringing good things into our community, and hope that maybe you have experienced or heard about some of the events mentioned above.
Keep checking our website to find out what is happening for you to be involved in.
