Dear friends,
We are living through a period that will no doubt be written about extensively in the history books. The last few months have been a learning curve requiring a time of adjustment for everyone, whatever your age or occupation and the next few months also promise to be unfamiliar as we absorb the implications of the continued social distancing guidelines for our daily lives.
Dear Supporters and Partners,
Due to the current COVID-19 crisis the ministry of GROW has become severely restricted. With the indefinite closure of all schools and social gatherings Oskar is unable to continue to perform the majority of tasks that he undertakes on a regular basis.
The GROW Trustees and Management Group met via conference call to consider the situation, bearing in mind the welfare of Oskar personally and that of the future and longevity of the Trust and its work. We were able to take advice from the HR and legal department of Scripture Union with regard to the Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) and how it might impact GROW.
Can you believe that it’s been over a quarter of a century since the world was first introduced to Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Pheobe and Joey?
Last year, was a big year for Friends. Not only did the show celebrate its twenty fifth anniversary, but it also celebrated being the most streamed programme in the UK, for the second year in a row. Fourteen years after the show finished, viewers in the UK still cannot get enough of the six friends hanging out in Central Perk, and a whole new generation of fans have become obsessed with the show.
Happy New Year!
January is often a time when people reflect on what has happened over the previous year and so to help you with your January and post Christmas blues, we want to take the opportunity to look back and tell you about last month’s Christmas assembly, which was delivered to pupils in Glenwood and Glenrothes High School. The theme for this year’s Christmas assembly (or last year’s, depending on the way you look at it) was “reconnecting at Christmas”, which allowed us to explore the fact that God sent Jesus to reconnect with us. Continue reading “Reconnecting”
For the last three years senior pupils at Auchmuty High School have voted on topics they would like the chaplaincy team to cover in assemblies. Each year we have written and presented assemblies built around the three most popular topics, which have included social media, identity, rest & relaxation, spirituality, relationships and love. This year we have decided to link the three topics that were chosen (Ourselves, Our Planet and Friends) into a series on health.
God’s people in the Old Testament had a much more holistic approach to health than we do today and the Hebrew word Shalom (often translated as peace) would be used to consider health in terms of our relationships as well as our physical and mental health. For God’s people in the Old Testament “health” involved your physical and mental health, as well as your relationship with God, your relationship with others, your relationship with yourself and even your relationship with the planet. This year we want to stop and take a health check and consider what it means to be healthy in terms of our relationship to ourselves, our planet and our friends.
Just before the summer holidays began we had the opportunity to speak to pupils in Auchmuty and Glenrothes High and encourage them to make the most of their time off from school. This year, our end of year assembly focused on taking a break, as we encouraged pupils to use the summer to take a break, not just from school, but from a couple of other aspects of our daily lives that can often leave us feeling a little stressed or overwhelmed.
Our May 2019 Newsletter is out now. Just click the link below to download it as a PDF document.
The school year is almost at an end and as we approach the summer holidays many primary seven pupils are preparing to transition to secondary school.
The move from primary to secondary school can be daunting for pupils and there is a great deal of uncertainty as rumours of what it will or won’t be like spread like wild fire. They will move from being the oldest pupils in a smaller school to being the youngest pupils in a much larger school, from having one teacher to having many and from the comfort of a building and classroom that they know, to having to navigate their way through a maze of classrooms and corridors several times a day.
This year our Easter assemblies are encouraging pupils to think about what gives them hope. Hope is an incredibly powerful and important thing to us all. Hope can give us courage and can help us to carry on when things are hard. This year we wanted to look at the power of hope and the living hope that we have in Jesus’ resurrection.
Our January 2019 Newsletter is out now. Just click the link below to download if as a PDF document.
