The Finnie family in Blighty, December 2021
Dean and Paula pastor The Gathering together
The Gathering
Baptisms at The Gathering
Preparing to serve at The Gathering's Soup Kitchen
Soup Kitchen Welcome To 2022 lunch
Serving hands - the heart of The Gatheirng
Thankful Thursdays
HOPE Home Based Care Team
Gathering Ground
Staying fit as a family
The Helderberg - The prettiest of the mountains we face
One of the many joys in leading church, is watching the ebb & flow of church life, and how some people are planted in for the long haul whilst others are with you for just a short time.
Today at The Gathering we had the privilege of sending Delena (& her husband John) off in prayer (we prayed our best prayers), and love to begin a new life in the Eastern Cape in a town called Buffels Vlei.
As ever, his photographs are truly stunning and he perfectly captured the heart and essence of The Gathering's Soup Kitchen.
We'll be serving 200 litres of home made Pea & Ham Soup. As well as serving our regulars with the usual packet of instant noodles, each recipient will receive a yummy home baked cookie, and the school age kids will each get a goodie bag containing a few school supplies together with a some sweets.
This is what church is all about! There was such a buzz at The Gathering yesterday as we prepared soup, hosted our Homework Club and launched our first go at offering free haircuts to any men/boys who wanted. Add in to this the fact that we also took food to the two Macassar Soup Kitchen's The Gathering supports and it really was an amazing day of blessings!
We are thrilled that The Gathering's Homework Club has restarted.
It's actually in its second week of the new school year and already we're full with quite a long waiting list.
We also have quite a lot of Gr7s from the local primary school asking to join so we are going to have to look at ways of accommodating them too. What a brilliant problem to have!
In our seemingly never ending quest to defeat the inconvenience of loadshedding we are always looking for ways to keep the power on so as not to interrupt our Homework Club and other church activities that are reliant upon a decent internet connection.
So it's great to have a mini UPS which can power the modem and router for our fibre connection meaning we can stay connected in spite of Eskom's dastardly tricks in trying to defeat us.
Today was an exciting day for The Gathering as we were blessed with 23 boxes of peanut pastes from our dear friends at My Father's House in Simon's Town.
This means we can once again be generous with the pastes which have become incredibly popular amongst our Soup Kitchen regulars.
Sadly only three of the kids got the message for this week, but word is out and so the next time loadshedding is scheduled for when a Homework Club is happening the kids know that we'll be ready and waiting to serve them.
So yesterday for the first time we were able to crack on with The Gathering's Homework Club through the scheduled two hour blackout thanks to our mini inverter which not only charged the tablets but then kept the router and wifi running for the 2½ hours for which the electricity was off.
Today was doubly exciting because not only is it a Thursday and we get to serve our regulars at The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen,but today our Matha@Home Homework Club restarted after an almost two year furlough thanks to the pandemic.
It just felt so right to have the Homework Club operating again and the kids were really enjoying themselves and the attention they were receiving from Delena our beloved facilitator.
These are the main ingredients but I'll also be adding a lot of salt, pepper, garlic, herbs & spices and some soup powder just to top off the flavour.
This is an exciting moment as we prepare to relaunch The Gathering's Maths@Home Homework Club after an almost two year break thanks to Covid.
The first eight children have been accepted and the letters are about to go out to their parents/carers to inform them that they can begin on Tuesday next week.
It is always a joy to welcome a guest speaker but an absolute pleasure to welcome someone like Rose who is so anointed in her prophetic gift of ministering God's word to his children.
At The Gathering we had to close our Homework Club down back in March 2020 as the initial lockdown began, and due to a number of issues we have only just been in a position in which we could set about reopening it whilst also doing our best to ensure that the children attending are as safe as possible.
Following our prayerletter which we sent out yesterday and which can be read here, we want to explain a little more, give a bit more info to the background and answer a few questions...
At The Gathering we have never wanted a building for the sake of having a building, rather, we have always wanted a venue from which we can serve the local community from Monday to Saturday with Sunday Gatherings being merely the cherry on the cake.
It was good to finally install some industrial quality fans in The Gathering's premises this morning.
Previously we had two domestic quality fans in the front and one at the back, and to be honest they were a bit rubbish.
So it was a blessing to be able to use some of the money left over from the Soup Kitchen Christmas Lunch to buy five new good quality fans that will do a great job at cooling us all down. It's just a shame I only got to install them at the end of summer.
This is a little mentioned part of The Gathering's ministry to the neediest women & girls in our community.
For a few years now we have regularly been collecting sanitary pads and other sanitary products to give to the neediest and most vulnerable women in the community.
Initially this was aimed at the older girls attending our Homework Club because so many teenage girls simply miss school when they're menstruating because they have little or no access to the necessary products to help.
The gathering has been running a Homework club for a few years now and it was an effective programme in terms of assisting local kids with their mathematics and seeing their grades rising across all subjects. Most teachers and educationalists will readily admit that when a pupil is confident in Maths it generally reflects on the rest of their schooling, so it has been great to be helping some of the local kids. It was also an effective piece of outreach in that it allowed us regular contact with their families and we loved serving the community in this way.
