Creative Mission by Rona Orme
ISBN 9-781841-018065
£8.99, Published by Bible Reading Fellowship
A review from Barry Hill:
Brilliantly simple, straightforward and highly practical. Rona Orme, Children’s Missioner in Peterborough Diocese, has produced a book packed full with a feast of ideas suitable for children, young families and adults. It’s rare to find a book where so many ideas can be taken straight from the page to a group or service and yet Rona manages it with dozens of ideas to suit both Christian festivals (all the ones you’d expect plus some that have been a little forgotten like Lammastide), weird internet days (like national apple day), milestones (like back to school, and the start of holidays) and various other important days (like Red Nose Day, World Book Day, Prisons Week and World Toilet Day). There are even ideas to accompany what people might be thinking of at any given time, for example an idea suited to X Factor/Strictly Come Dancing!
It’s rare to find a book that can work so naturally in many different environments. I could imagine many of the ideas working as well in a large town or city centre church as in a Messy Church or toddler group of half a dozen. Rona draws on her experience in rural mission (she wrote a book on rural mission with children a few years ago) with ideas that translate well to smaller rural groups, and also her role in service leading (she is a Reader in the Church of England) with ideas suitable as the foundation of am All Age service. Now working with the development of a Fresh Expression in a school on a new suburban estate, one could imagine many of her ideas translating seamlessly into a Fresh Expression of Church.
Most ideas come complete with where to go for more resources plus internet links for additional info. They all come with Bible links which could be explored further in the context of a service or extended teaching time. Not all the work is done for the reader in developing the Bible passages in every one of the fifty plus ideas, but activities do emerge from the Bible passage(s) providing a helpful and normally easy springboard for those contexts where additional teaching is needed.
In what is already a crowded marketplace of print and online resources, Creative Mission stands out as accessible for many contexts and experiences as well as full of ideas ready to go as they are.
