Sunday School chaos
Today there was a double commitment for me, with my second lesson for the year at the Sunday School and then leading the monthly service at Rovereto. Like most ministries in the church, the Sunday School has experienced growth since last year. Then there were a maximum of 5 children, and usually 3-4 present. It was fairly manageable. With two new children coming to church, and two others coming up from the class of the smaller children, there is now a theoretical maximum of 9, although only 8 have come so far. And in fact this morning there were eight children plus me around the table for six people (because there is no room in the corridor where we meet for a larger table), which instead of being “fairly manageable” is more like “total chaos”. In situations like this, it is good to know that it is God who teaches, and not my ability to keep the children in line. Since we were doing Joshua today, at the end of the lesson we joined up with the smaller children and marched around the walls of Jericho that I had constructed from cardboard boxes, before I knocked down the wall and took the treasure of Jericho (lollies) away for God. That wasn’t only like total chaos, it was total chaos!
The other news in church today was another announcement of a pregnancy. We now are up to six pregnant ladies, although we are still short of our record of 8 pregnancies at the same time. The new pregnancy is one of the members of the new Saturday afternoon group in the Valsugana that our family goes to, so although now there are 8 children from Stefania’s age down in that group, by the end of the church year in June there will be 11. It does make the Bible studies interesting – we are all learning to shout a lot more as we discuss.
This week, apart from the usual activities, the main thing to pray for is a meeting on Thursday evening in which we will be talking about the Rovereto church planting project, and about where we want to go in the future and what we want to do to get there. There will be quite a few (maybe a dozen) people there who are interested in and are committed to helping the project, which makes a bit difference from the three people that there were at the first such meeting we had two years ago.