EEC Blog

It was great to be in Ennis recently with the Amazing Journey and to work with you sharing the good news about Jesus in one of your local schools - Knockanean National.

We should continue to pray that God will water the seed we planted in that school and that His Holy Spirit will work in those young lives.

For those of you who don’t already know about the Amazing journey, it is an exciting presentation of Bible stories to primary school children which uses creative story telling, colourful displays and walk-on Bible characters to introduce children to the key stories, events and message of the Bible. If few children come to our churches, then the best place to reach them is in their schools.

There are 3 main aims of the amazing journey:

* To teach children Bible stories
* To teach children the message of the Bible
* To enthuse children to read the Bible for themselves

I started working with Baptist Youth and the Amazing Journey in September 2007 (part -time) and I have been going into schools since March 2008. I work with local churches, both to get the work more widely known and to get them to book me to come to their area and to go into their local schools. So the role of the local church is crucial!

There are many children here in Ireland that need to hear the good news about Jesus and we have open doors into most schools at the moment; but we need to grab the opportunities whilst we have them!

In 2005/2006 there were 457,889 children in primary schools around Ireland - that’s a lot of children that need to hear the good news about Jesus!

I also work part time for a church in Dublin (Grosvenor Road Baptist) and so my time is divided and my week is busy. I am not yet in schools every week but hopefully that will happen in the near future; please pray with me to that end.

I will be finishing up with the church work this summer and hopefully this will mean I can concentrate fully on the Amazing Journey work. Please pray for me as I go into schools, I love being with the children but it can be discouraging when I don’t have many bookings!

Please pray more churches will catch the vision of the Amazing Journey and that ultimately more children will be reached.

We’ve had some great experiences already. I was working with a church in Swords, Dublin, before Christmas and we went into both the girls and boys schools in Donabate. The girls school has around 450 pupils and the boys school some 400 pupils. Following our presentations, over 220 New Testaments were requested!

The principal of the boy’s school was very appreciative of our visit and she wrote a letter thanking us saying “I am delighted with the great response to your offer of children’s bibles.” She later says “thank you again for working with us and bringing the word of God to our children.”

What a great God we have to share with others and what great opportunities in this country to go into schools, but we need to grab those opportunities with both hands and pray that God will bring many to know Him as Lord and Saviour.

As I said at the start, it was great to work with you recently and hopefully it will be the first of many visits to the West. Thanks especially to Grace for organising the visit and to all who helped on the day. God bless you.

Charis Tully