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The Finnie family in Blighty, December 2021
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Dean and Paula pastor The Gathering together -
The Gathering -
Baptisms at The Gathering -
Preparing to serve at The Gathering's Soup Kitchen -
Soup Kitchen Welcome To 2022 lunch
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Serving hands - the heart of The Gatheirng -
Thankful Thursdays -
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HOPE Home Based Care Team -
Gathering Ground -
Staying fit as a family -
The Helderberg - The prettiest of the mountains we face
Showing posts sorted by date for query soup kitchen. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query soup kitchen. Sort by relevance Show all posts
The Gathering's Soup Kitchen continues to do some sterling work in terms of serving the neediest and most vulnerable in the community, but also building bridges with folk who need that little bit more in terms of support & care, and it's a real privilege to be able to serve through the church.
Whilst we love what we do, and wouldn't change it for the world, the responsibilities we carry on behalf of The Gathering can become tiring, so sometimes it's just good essential to escape together.
We're in the countdown for our trip to Blighty, and life just seems to get busier & busier.
In the midst of preparing for our trip, we're still juggling life and having to make some plans for the future, especially regarding my health.
We're really excited to be coming back to Blighty for a month, it means we'll miss a month of winter here, but most importantly, it means we'll get to spend time with Eli, having not seen him for over 18 months!
After the joy of our three Christmas Specials at The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen, it's great to be back to the joy of our normal Soup Kitchen, replete with loadshedding.
Butternut is back in season locally, so it was a case of prepping and chopping 18kgs of them to make one hundred litres of delicious home-made soup.
One of the many joys in leading church, is watching the ebb & flow of church life, and how some people are planted in for the long haul whilst others are with you for just a short time.
Today at The Gathering we had the privilege of sending Delena (& her husband John) off in prayer (we prayed our best prayers), and love to begin a new life in the Eastern Cape in a town called Buffels Vlei.
As ever, his photographs are truly stunning and he perfectly captured the heart and essence of The Gathering's Soup Kitchen.
We'll be serving 200 litres of home made Pea & Ham Soup. As well as serving our regulars with the usual packet of instant noodles, each recipient will receive a yummy home baked cookie, and the school age kids will each get a goodie bag containing a few school supplies together with a some sweets.
Today's particular obstacle was perhaps the strangest to overcome...
The water in Firgrove had been off since 6pm the previous night and it still wasn't on at 11am when I needed 100 litres of water to get ready making the soup.
It's a great blessing to see so much food stacked up in the church office/kitchen, especially knowing that Paula negotiated such a great deal with the shopkeeper that we got +/-1700 individual packets of noodles for the princely sum of R1.60 each (7p each in Blighty). In the local shops a cheap packet of noodles would normally cost around R5 each (22p).
What a blessing. Thank you LORD!
This picture warms my heart as it captures the very heart and DNA of The Gathering.
We don't run our Soup Kitchen as an evangelistic outreach, and we put no conditions on who can or cannot receive soup, we serve all comers.
The reason for this is that we use our weekly Soup Kitchen as a way of thanking God for all He's done for us and as such we want to share those blessings with others.
I wasn't supposed to be preaching at The Gathering this morning, but events in the week meant that it was over to me, and as ever it was a joy and a privilege to share the Word.
During the week I had briefly contemplated giving our Gathering over to an impromptu Testimony Sunday, but decided against this because I knew we would be low on numbers this morning, and partly because I knew I was being lazy in not preparing a word.
Well before I even got up to preach, God had interrupted our Gathering spectacularly and it turned in to an impromptu Testimony Sunday with testimony after testimony being shared.
We've been making 140 litres of soup each week for a while now, and even on our quieter evenings, the soup has all gone within thirty minutes, meaning we have had to turn some folk away.
Testimony Sunday at The Gathering is always a joy and a blessing, and this morning was no different!
The stream of testimonies of God's goodness just kept flowing. What was clear is that most had been having a tough year, but each acknowledged that it was only by God's awesome grace that they had got to where they were and were blessed because of His loving kindness.
On Thursday it was the turn of The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen to once again enjoy the inconvenience of loadshedding.
This is what church is all about! There was such a buzz at The Gathering yesterday as we prepared soup, hosted our Homework Club and launched our first go at offering free haircuts to any men/boys who wanted. Add in to this the fact that we also took food to the two Macassar Soup Kitchen's The Gathering supports and it really was an amazing day of blessings!
We are really looking forward to doing something a little bit different at The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen this week...
Following a conversation with one of our Soup Kitchen regulars - who has recently started gathering with us on Sundays - in which he asked for money for a haircut, we got to thinking about how we could help without giving him money. The Gathering has quite a strict policy on not giving financial handouts for a number of reasons.
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