Promoting Wholesome Living at Lewisham People's Day

Lewisham Seventh-day Adventist church had a new focus at this year's People's day in Mountsfield Park: meeting the needs of the whole person. Our church's past attendance has been solely focussed on health and our Health Department has always done an amazing job of promoting positive health, giving free health checks and consultations with doctors and other health professionals.This year however, in addition to the Health Team, we had in attendance the Deaf Ministries, Social, Community Services and Personal Ministries teams, who met with the many persons from the community who visited our tent and helped to meet their needs.

Although this year's health coverage was reduced as compared to the previous years they still managed to conduct around 160 blood pressure and health checks, and many persons learned about Diabetes and how it can affect their health. Lewisham's Health Ministries Leader Sonia Swaby noted that people were especially eager to learn about nutrition and have consultations with our nutritional specialist.

A marvellous new addition to the People's Day contingent was our relatively new Deaf Ministries Team, who not only gave out literature to promote Deaf awareness and learning, signed up many persons who were interested in the Introduction to British Sign Language class they run, and conversed with the Deaf who attended, but they also assisted in interpreting when Deaf community members came to the tent for health checks or other information. On previous occasions this would not have been easily possible, and so it is a great achievement that in such a short time they have been able to provide a positive service.

It was really quite inspiring to see how many hearing community members were interested in learning BSL and that we were able to gather names to gauge interest for a Deaf Club, a sorely needed local amenity.In addition to all of this the Social team were out promoting our upcoming Family Fun Day and Picnic which will be taking place on August 10, and the Personal Ministries Department were there to give out literature, both about our church and what we have to offer, as well as on religious themes.According to Anthony Morris, the Church's Personal Ministries leader, this year's People's Day was much closer to his vision of how the church should be moving: as one united whole, but with different departments working together to meet the needs of our community.He says the next step is to have follow-up activities to meet with our community contacts and allow them to participate in the areas they expressed interest in. In the coming weeks we will be launching a new initiative called 'Soul 2 Soul Activities at the Hub' which they promoted and people were very curious about and it caused quite a bit of interest.His intention is to reach people at their need and provide activities and services that will interest them on a monthly basis, starting in August. To this end the church will be having marriage enrichment sessions, parent and toddler's groups, senior citizen's club, football practice, deaf club and much more.This is only the beginning and he aims to move forward for Christ in 2014.

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