'A chain made for dancing'...

One of our FP interns, Rachel, loves to create prophetic art - pictures communciated to her by God. During her FP yer, she’ll be doing various prophetic art projects.

She writes…

“Prophetic art is just another way of hearing God, through pictures. You may have seen me on Sunday with an easel. This is what I was doing…

“This is what God was saying to me through the picture:

On Tuesday my Dad had visited and dropped off some stuff. On Saturday night I was slightly stressed and I’d been looking through it to find something and found that my nan had slipped a golden chain mail fancy dress belly dancing costume into my packing. I just immediately felt joy, and as I looked at it, this ridiculous costume looked like armour. But this armour wasn’t a weight; it was made for dancing. I felt like God was saying that sometimes putting on our daily armour can become something heavy and solemn, but that actually it was made for joy and for freedom. So this is supposed to be the chain mail links of armour, but with tassels because the armour God has given me was made for dancing!

If any of you are interested in having a go at prophetic art, I’ll be running a workshop on Saturday 2nd November in The Durham Centre, 10:30am to 12pm, straight after the Prayer Breakfast, so feel free to also come for the prayer meeting then stay for prophetic art. It will mostly be practical but also just give more of an idea as to what this is all about.

Update regarding Emmanuel Church Chester-le-Street

See below for an update regarding Emmanuel Church Chester-le-Street:

Following on from our announcement in June about the future of Emmanuel Church Chester-le-Street, we are excited to announce that the new name for the church going forward will be Redeemer Church.

Redeemer Church will be officially launched in Chester-le-Street on Sunday 26th January, following a joint service at The Durham Centre on Sunday 19th January where the two congregations will join together as Emmanuel for the last time. During the service, we will celebrate everything that God has done over the last few years, both in Durham and Chester-le-Street, as well as praying for one another.

Further information regarding Redeemer Church and these dates will be released in due course. In the meantime, here is the video that was shown in Chester-le-Street this morning, announcing the new name

Make Lunch Returns!

We love Jesus, and we love County Durham! That's why we are passionate as a church about reaching out into our local communities, to see lives transformed and people come to know the living God!

As part of this, during the summer holidays, we ran our first Make Lunch club, at Gilesgate Primary School. This was a holiday activity club for children and families to have fun, make friends and enjoy food. Parents could chat with volunteers or take cookery classes. Children enjoyed a fun-packed programme led by Pete and Ali - our brilliant kids’ work team!

It was a fantastic success: 25-30 guests per session, almost 50 children over the eight sessions (across four weeks) and almost 200 meals served to children and families from the community. A big thanks to the 30-plus church volunteers. It was amazing to see some of the families we met at Make Lunch visit our Family Service - hopefully the first of many.

The school headmaster was thrilled and the families wanted it to continue, so we're pleased to announce that Make Lunch will be returning during half-term, on Tuesday 29th and Friday 1st November.

To help make it happen, your amazing support is once again needed. To volunteer, please speak to Jenny Booth. Please also be praying for Make Lunch and the team behind it.

Take a look at some of the fun we had over the summer during our first Make Lunch sessions!