Gordon Thornett, Sutton Coldfield Chamber Choir & Bournville Strings for a fabulous 9th Annual Christmas Charity Concert
Almost 300 gathered to hear and see this wonderful Christmas event again and had a wonderful time. Money was raised for St Martin’s creative arts ministries and for St Basils, working with homeless young people. Thankyou for all who gave generously. Final figures from the collection came to £470! If you’d like to you can comment or add your thanks to the choir and musicians here.
Here’s some info about a project that our young people, working with other young people in the city, did recently.
Transforming Church – St. Martin in the Bull Ring – St. Thomas Garretts Green
MyFaith Video Project
Just before Christmas 2011 we applied for and secured funding from the Transforming Church Fund to run a video project at St. Martin in the Bull Ring. The concept was:
– to team up with another youth group from Birmingham;
– to run training sessions for all aspects of film-making, recording and editing;
– to use workshops, activities and discussions to explore what faith is and what it means in our lives.
The working title for the project was ‘My Faith’, and we hoped that by the end of the project the young people would have developed the skills and ideas to produce several short films about their faith.
In Spring 2012 we linked up with the youth group at St. Thomas Garretts Green, and we held our first project day just after Easter 2012. Through the summer term we went on to run another four project days, including a group trip to a rock-climbing centre. We have now (finally!) finished putting in the final editorial touches and are publishing and publicising our 3 short films.
– “MyFaith 1 – The question…What is faith?” – In this film the young people introduce the question – ‘what is faith?’
– “MyFaith 2 – News flash! What is faith?” – The ‘faith’ question has gone viral, so our news team hits the streets to find out what everyone is talking about…
– “MyFaith 3 – My Faith.” – In this film the young people reflect and share what faith means to them.
We have now posted the films to the video sharing website YouTube (links below), and held two ‘Premier’ events – on Sunday 18th November at St. Thomas’ and on Sunday 25th November at St. Martin’s.
For us the initial project is completed, but it is our hope that these films might be an inspiration and a resource to other youth groups and workers. In light of this we want to invite other groups to think about creating video responses, or extra films to add in to this project – our work and exploration of what faith is has been far from exhaustive! We would be really excited to hear from anyone interested in this, and would be more than happy to share our few insights, experiences (and possibly even equipment…).
So get comfy, grab your popcorn, and follow the links below… Enjoy and God bless! J
