Over the bank holiday weekend (4, 5 and 6 May 2013), WSM Bristol was invited to run Football Tournaments for local kids in Horfield, Lockleaze and Southmead areas of the city.

We were blessed to have about 100 kids come and play football over the 3 days, all enjoying playing in competitive matches and meeting other children from around the area.

We were also very blessed with great weather too, praise God. Each day was sunny and dry, with the little rain we had falling on the Saturday morning and scorching sun on the Monday in Southmead.

After the games, children were awarded with prizes and were given free copies of the New Testaments and some Sports tracts to take away with them.

Please continue to pray for all those children and parents we met, that through their involvement in playing football at The Noise and through what they saw, heard and will read that they will have met Jesus. Please pray for the follow up afterwards, that we can further build the relationships we made.

Thank you for all your prayers and support.

It was obvious God had his hand on this new project right from the start; five weeks out we had a problem with our planned venue, following some prayer from our team and the Church God made a way, where it seemed like there was no way.  The venue was secured and thanks to Resound’s good relationship with the School, we only had to pay £1 for three days worth of hire!

During the three days of Get Sported Resound we had sporty fun with 29 different children from the local community, the majority of which Fran work’s with on a weekly basis in the local schools, which is good for continued relationships.  The children enjoyed football, cricket, hockey, tennis, basketball, dodgeball, art and tag rugby and learned about the character traits of generosity, compassion and doing the right thing through our Sporting Stars curriculum during our Team Talks.  All of this despite the unseasonably cold weather!  The gospel was shared through our curriculum with 9 children responding to the good news and during our end of day presentations I had the chance to share the Church’s vision with parents and pray in front of them.

The children responded well to their first experience of Get Sported with many of them still talking about the fun they had when I see them in School and asking when the next one will be!  I am also privileged to have witnessed increased confidence in several of the children who are carrying this forward into their school lives.  The feedback from parents had been equally positive; they are also asking when the next one will be and we had a very encouraging message left by one parent on the Church answerphone.

Please pray going forward for a time to be found to run the event again in the summer holidays and for the School providing the venue who are struggling to accomodate us in the summer at the moment due to some building work they have planned.

Great time at the Leaders retreat this weekend. All the CST leaders and CO-leaders from around the country gathered together for training and empowerment. We spent a lot of time in the Word and sharing what God has been doing in each of the different areas. So many encouraging stories to hear and learning to be done from each CST. We had a couple of workshops on ‘building your team’ and on promotion and communications both which helped to equip and inspire teams. To top of an amazing weekend shared together we spent some great time praying over each team, being filled with the spirit and gaining God’s empowerment to go back to our towns and cities and continue with the work He is doing through us. Praise God for an amazing time of fellowship, training and empowerment.

Four teams met on a cold wet Monday night to play in our fun friendly tournament. Mustard Tree’s Warmley Warriers rose to the challenge and stole the championship back from Cosmic in a nail biting penalty shoot out. We were really pleased to see the Church of the Nazerene represented for the first time and give our other teams a run for their money. We were blessed to have WSM Bath’s James Quine referee one of our wettest tournaments yet. We were grateful to Iain Nash, a new recruit to the Bristol team, for sharing his passion for football and Jesus. We are much anticipating the final tournament of the year and to see who takes our Championship Trophy home at the end of the year. (November 26th)

What an amazing weekend. We joined 800 volunteers who tirelessly worked all weekend to show God’s love in practical ways. 120 children came and played in football tournaments over 4 locations (3 of which were put on during the fun days in Lockleaze, Horfield and Southmead and we were also at Sea Mills). On Saturday we cleared the pitch for 8 teenagers while the children tried their football skills at various stations. Over the weekend 29 Gideon New Testament bibles were given out. The weather on Monday turned for the worst but it didn’t hampen our spirits and God was in control. We saw rain of biblical proportions and finally had to call it a day as they ran off for shelter. One of the highlights of the weekend was listening to the children sing as they played football to a well known music track over the PA system. It was a brilliant weekend with lots of great conversations with children and their parents and the skillful football played made for an exciting weekend.