This month at Messy church we were looking at being Dazzling Disciples and how we can shine in the world.  We looked at the story of how God promised Abraham as many descendants as the stars and how these descendants would go on to be disciples, following Gods way.  We talked about how we can shine by the things that we say and do and in the way that we love one another.

To explore the theme we used the following activities.  

• Acrostic disciples, we thought of different words to describe a disciple beginning with each letter of the word disciple.  This helped us think about what a disciple is.
•  Biscuits were the food of choice this month, in the shape of stars. Decorated with stars and we thought about how we should remember Jesus every time we eat. 
• We made some very complicated woven stars to help us think about how God is woven into our lives.
• The creche was transformed into the night sky with light up stars and decorations.  We used torches to find scriptures written on some of the stars which provided the answers to a quiz.  We thought about how if God knows all of the stars by name he must know each of us by name too.
• 5,4,3,2,1, Blast-off!!!! We made some launching rockets to help us think about what messages Jesus would want us to send to people today.  The messages were written on the rockets ready to be launched.
• Everyone ended up with frizzy hair as we used static electricity from balloons to make some tissue paper disciples dance. As we did this we thought about how God helps is to be his disciples. 
• We thought about how we could shine as a disciple as we coloured in and completed puzzles. 

After the activities we joined together for the celebration where we learnt a new song based on Philippians 2:14-15  “Do everything without grumbling or arguing,  so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.”  Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky”. You can find the song on youtube by searching “stars philippians” Stars (Philippians 2:14-15) Then we had our story and a message followed by a prayer where we connected everybody with wool as we prayed.

We then ate together with a BBQ cooked by Roy and had starry topped ice-cream for dessert.