St Peters

Our visit to St Peters today was great.  We introduced the children to a new song 'Gaint of Faith' before telling the story of Peter walking on the water to Jesus.  We used a Bob Hartman story from his 'Telling the Bible over 100 Stories to read out loud'. Each line is repeated 3 times and each time you can use a different voice or express it in a different way. As always with assemblies we would like to involve the children so a set of words that all rhyme were displayed on the screen but not necessarily in the right order for the story at the end of the line I paused to allow the children to say the word   - the words were; BOO, PHEW, CANOE, YOU,TWO, SHOE, OH POO WOO HOO IT'S TRUE So for example I read 'That ghost looks like Jesus,' said Peter to his friends. (repeated 3 times) then I say - And all his friends were relieved - ..... the children should respond with PHEW!  At the end of the talk I spoke to the children a little about Peter as well as about boats and about how difficult it would have been for Peter to step out onto the water.  I told the children that Peter had to trust Jesus, although it might have been scary.  I continued by talking about a chair we sit on them all the time and we trust that it will hold our weight but stepping out onto water is much harder and requires a lot of trust and faith.  But if we take our eyes of Jesus as Peter did then we start to sink just like Peter did, only to be rescued by Jesus.  It is quite a difficult concept to get across to children about faith and trust God for things and it might trigger questions in their minds in the future - I hope so and pray so.  To end we sang Inright Outright Sarah then closed the assembly with a prayer.