Charlotte Burt is the Children and Families Ministry Coordinator at Mount Baptist, in Mount Maunganui, Tauranga. She has 4 young children and is passionate about giving them a childhood where knowing God and having a relationship with Him is role modelled and experienced in all areas of life. This spills over into her job where she hopes to help shape that with other families and children.
Originally published in Woven, the newsletter of the Children and Families Ministries of the Baptist Churches of New Zealand, this story is republished with permission.
On Saturday July 4th Mount Baptist Kids hosted a kids market called ‘Pocket Money’. We wanted to give our kids space to showcase their creations, their talents, their entrepreneurial spirits and/or the opportunity to make some pocket money. We also wanted a way to bring our local families in the wider community together.
We opened up the 20 stall space to the community - not just within our church family- and all stalls booked out! We had a range of exciting options from a lemonade stand, lucky dips, home baking, comic books, seedlings, handmade jewellery, crocheted hats, a clothing brand, handmade watercolour cards and many more.
We invited a coffee cart and some young buskers.
We prayed for sunshine and for people to show up. God delivered.
It all came together and we were busy from start to finish. Over the 2 hours we had around 200 people come down. The excitement was high for both the stall holders AND their friends coming down to support. Many stallholders made over $100 pocket money which was so awesome for them.
We were stoked to see so many local families connecting with each other. Enjoying company over a coffee, meeting new people and hopefully breaking down that stigma people have with church. It was a great opportunity for us to simply build friendship with our local families.
We promoted this on social media via Mt Baptist’s community outreach initiative ‘Neighbourhood’.
Photos supplied by Charlotte Burt.
