It was great to come together for a day with our whole Salt & Light Advance family for our annual celebration on 5 November. We spent some time all together in worship, before the children went off to their own groups, including sessions run by Adventure+ for KS2, and Open Doors, who support Christians facing persecution, ran a session with the youth to help raise awareness of the challenges faced by Christians in other countries. We then commissioned Rich and Anna Ellwood in prayer and prophecy as they step up to lead the Advance Sphere, and honoured and prayed over Steve and Bev Jones as they step down from this role.
We were blessed to have Colin Baron with us as our main speaker for the day. Colin is part of the Newfrontiers Together apostolic team and is the founder of Christ Church Manchester, so it was great to have him speaking to us on church planting in the morning and leading two seminars, “Why should I care about church planting?” and “How do I play my part in mission and evangelism?” in the afternoon.
We also had a range of all-age activities during the afternoon, including indoor archery and a climbing wall provided by Adventure+, which were a lot of fun!
Chris and Stephanie Neal also organised a 20s-30s gathering over lunch, to help young adults get to know each other better and build connections across the churches.
At the end of the day we came back together for another short time of worship to close.
The link for the livestream recording of the morning session can be found here.