On Friday 11th June, over 180 keen golfers gathered at Chevin Golf Club, Duffield to compete in the 25th Briars Am-Am.
'LIVE IT' are a series of events taking place all across the Nottingham Diocese. They are a chance for young people in different areas to meet each other to share and celebrate their faith. This is the story so far....
Held again this year at the Moorways Centre in Derby, we saw our biggest ever turn out! This year saw around a thousand year 6s from all over the diocese gathered together to reflect on taking the big step up to secondary school.
Well it was an amazing week, and finally here are the photos! Leave your comments on the post and thank you to all those who made this a really special Holy Week.
The photos from Advent 2009 are finally up, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!
October the 9-12th saw the biggest ever reunion of past and present Briars team members. In part of a series of events to mark the 40th Anniversary of The Briars over 150 people dropped in at some point to make this weekend a truly memorable celebration.
As part of the visit of St Therese’s relics to our cathedral in Nottingham, the Youth Service led an All Night Vigil. Starting at 11.00 on Monday 5th October and finishing the next morning with Mass at 6.30, it was split into three parts, each focussing on a different aspect of St Therese’s spirituality.
Welcome to the reach4 page. Here you can find out information about all of the services that reach4 offer (via the services and programmes page), and find out about the work we are currently doing in the diocese.
Have a look around and check out our current projects. If you want to know more, or want to book reach4, then you can contact us at reach4@ndcys.com or by using the details on the contact page. You can also keep in touch with the team, and with other young people involved in our projects, by going to our ‘Connect’ page.
Below is a list of our most recent visits. You can have these updates and more delivered to you via RSS by clicking on the link to the right.
After today we are definitely excited for the pilgrimage to Lourdes in July!
It was lovely to get to meet some of you and we had a great chance to talk and have a laugh. Seeing the photos of some of you from last year was very entertaining and it was exciting to start looking at the details of this years pilgrimage.
Looking forward to seeing you all again and meeting anyone who was unable to come today.
Reach4
Our Lady of Good Counsel in Eastwood kick off the first of our Confirmation programmes in 2010. We’ll be working with the Confirmation group from February right through until their Confirmation on 20th May!
This is the place for you guys to keep up with our blogs on all our sessions with you and take a look at the photos too!
February 6th – Taster Day
Our Taster Day together was wicked! After spending a long time arranging the chairs in alternate colours in the circle, we spent time getting to know each other and looking at what our Confirmation programme was going to entail. After the break we were set a challenge to SAVE THE EGG! The Egg represented our faith; an egg can be really strong, but sometimes it can be very fragile too. Luckily, we all did an eggs-ellent (Ha!) job and we all stayed strong with absolutely no mess whatsoever! Well done for the liturgy you guys put together at the end of the day – it was awesome (especially the funky coloured lights)!
After all the laughs and effort you put in to today we’re very much looking forward to our first session with you…
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.March 3rd – Image of God
We were very excited to come back after the amazing Taster Day and this session turned out to be so much fun!
It was great to get to know more of you while drawing our images of God we had a good chance to talk. You guys are amazing – you are so easy to get on with and really put all your efforts into everything there is to do! It was very interesting to see all the different images we have of God and we ended up with some art masterpieces!
Well done everyone!
Looking forward to the next session!
March 10th – Who on Earth was Jesus?
Wow! The Jesus’s everyone made tonight were awesome! There were so many impressive features such as Jesus having fair-trade sandals, a cool guitar or loving Lady Ga Ga!
It’s always so much fun to spend time with you all in your breaks!
See you in a couple of weeks!
March 24th – Reconciliation
Tonight we explored the Sacrament of Reconciliation and were very kindly joined by Canon John and Fr. Paul Newman. It was great to have the freedom to ask the priests all the questions we had about confession and hand over all our worries to them too!
The atmosphere in the hall tonight was so chilled out and you made a real effort to relax and take some time out to think about stuff too. The banner you painted at the end looked wicked, especially now it’s hung up in church. Nice work, people!
17th April – Parish Community and Confirmation Names (Day Retreat)
It was great to be able to spend a whole day together and it flew by with all of the activities we got up to. We started by looking at the different roles in the parish and which of these roles we may be suited to (with some of you seeming to be destined to be priests!) The tower building was crazy and despite everyone going mad trying to make the tallest tower, unfortunately they didn’t stand very high.
The gameshow we played to find out more about some different saints was a lot of fun and hopefully helped some of you when thinking about what confirmation name you would like.
Mass was the perfect way to end such a great day and was a true celebration of all the effort you guys always put into the sessions. Well done to everyone for the part you played, whether it was acting, reading, doing the offertory or singing your parish should be very proud of you!
28th April – Gifts of the Holy Spirit
This evening was so much fun! You all threw yourselves into the games and made the night so enjoyable. I can’t believe we managed to fit so many activities into such a short space of time and hopefully they have helped us to remember and understand the gifts of the holy spirit…so be ready for us to test you on them next week!
Sacred Heart, Carlton kick off the second of our Confirmation programmes in 2010. We’ll be working with the Confirmation group between February and April!
This is the place for you guys to keep up with our blogs on all our sessions with you and take a look at the photos too!
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February 25th – Images of God
For our first session together we spent a long time getting to know each other. It was really cool to come and meet you guys and we’re really looking forward to working with you over the next few months (hopefully in a bigger space next time!). After a well deserved break we drew our own Images of God - it was really interesting to see everyone’s different ideas and it made for a cool night prayer display!
See you all next week….
March 4th – Who on earth is Jesus?
After a wonderful clip from Mary Poppins we broke into small groups and started the task of designing Jesus as we think he would be on earth. From fast cars to donkeys these Jesus’ were something else but we were very impressed with your efforts and thank you for all your hard work.
Looking forward to next time…
March 11th – Parish Community
Tonight we started with the challenging task of building the tallest free-standing tower that we could in our small groups – it wasn’t easy! Although there weren’t any successful structures there were more successes when we worked out all the different roles within the parish and hopefully after finding our whether we were a do’er, protector, imaginator, negotiator, co-ordinator, shaper, judge, team worker or specialist we all have a better idea of how we can help within our parishes.
March 25th – Reconciliation
Tonight took on a more reflective atmosphere as we said sorry for things we have done wrong. The end result were some beautiful banners using the ash from the paper which had our sins written on, that we burnt earlier in the evening. We hope you enjoyed the evening, see you soon for our last session!
April 24th – Confirmation names, Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit and Discipleship
There was a LOT packed into this day and you did really well to get through it all. We began by learning a bit about patron saints to help give us an idea of what name to choose as a confirmation name, well done to those of you who got the answers right and to those people who read during the gameshow. Our next activity was to explore and learn about the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. It was a lot of fun doing activities and playing different games to represent each of the gifts and our favourite definitely had to be Awe and Wonder! After that there were yet more things to be done, we watched a clip from Forrest Gump to explore our role today as disciples and then began to prepare the parts for our mass that evening. It was a great celebration of mass with a chance to sing songs, display your banners (from your reconciliation session) and to show off your reading and acting skills.
Good luck with the rehearsal and we’ll see you on the big day!
May 6th – Confirmation Day
Well done everyone!! After all that preparation it was great to be there to see you all get confirmed.
Thanks for all your work through the whole programme and good luck with everything!
Reach4
We had a wonderful day today, it was very busy but a lot of fun. The main focus of today was making decisions, and we explored the different ways we make decisions with our gameshow at the beginning of the day. Well done to all the volunteers who took part in the gameshow, you were very brave and entertaining.
You all then got the chance to make some decisions in your form group with the activity ‘put yourself on the line’ in which you all faced different statements and decided whether you agreed or disagreed with them. It was great to go round all the different from groups and hear the discussions you were having.
The liturgy in the afternoon was fantastic! All of the groups did so well with the parts that they prepared!
Reach4
Hello to everyone we met today! It was an awesome day, especially the final liturgy which you guys did really well preparing. It was so much fun to spend the day with you and to get to know you all, you’re all so energetic and friendly. Well done for all the work on justice and peace you did, you helped to make us feel empowered after the day was finished and hopefully you realise how much of a difference you can all make.
Good luck with everything!
Reach4
Hello to all of you from St Barnabas Cathedral, Our Lady and St Patrick’s and St Augustine’s that were there on Tuesday evening. It was only a short meeting but we all had a lot of fun working with you. Even though the bricks were pretty complicated to make and the questions took a lot of thinking through you all got stuck in and worked hard. It was great to see you a socialising and discussing your answers so readily and to share in some of your Confirmation preparation.
Good luck with the rest of your preparation and hopefully we’ll see you again soon!
Reach4
We were feeling very lucky to be returning to St. Mary’s today after an amazing Advent day with you guys… and it was even better this time! Fr. Dave kicked off our retreat day with an extremely entertaining assembly and started to get us thinking about the importance of Lent and how we can spend time becoming closer and more like Jesus.
Year 6 spent the day looking at the three themes of Lent; prayer, fasting and alms-giving and how we use them to become more like Jesus. It was so much fun working with you guys – you got stuck in right from the start. The alms-giving promises you made were inspirational – hope you’ve kept them up!
Mass at the end of the day was awesome – it was great to celebrate everything each class had done together. The singing was beautiful, especially Foundation and their wonderful introduction!
Have a happy Easter!
It was great to come back and see you guys again, even if it was for such a short amount of time. We really enjoyed spending time with you in prayer and experiencing some different ways to pray (even if that meant no music or lights because we blew a fuse! sorry!) You engaged with the activities really well and we hope that you found it useful. Good luck for the rest of your Confirmation preparation and the big day!
Reach4
In collaboration with CTU (Our Lady of Lourdes’ Youth Group) and God’s Gift music ministry, Reach 4 outreach ministry invited young people from the Derby parishes to be part of a production of Born for This; a dramatic presentation of the Stations of the Cross. It was part of a project led by the Diocesan Youth Service called ‘Live it …’ which involves inviting young people to come together in several locations around the diocese to reflect on and celebrate their faith and place in the Church. The evening took place,in Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Mickleover and was a resounding success with nearly 400 people coming to share in the unique experience.
Here are some of the photo’s of this amazing night.
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We had a wonderful day visiting your school and working with year 6. You all worked really hard to understand Lent and to prepare for Easter and the safe, promises and prayer pocket that you created were all fantastic. The Liturgy that you prepared for the end of the day was great, you all worked really hard on your parts of the liturgy and we were particularly impressed by the liturgical dance and song that you performed – it was fab! Hearing all of your achievements in the Golden Book just showed how talented you all are and we had a lovely day with you so thank you!
Reach4
