Meet Kevin!

Back to Church Sunday 2009; over 100,000 people around the world were welcomed as cherished guests to their local church. Excitingly, 2000 of those people were here in Lichfield Diocese. The Parish Mission Team had reports of people from 6 to 94 years old coming to church by personal invitation - with plenty in between! We hope and pray that lots of them may still be coming along, and genuinely part of congregations in weeks, months, and years to come.

On 26th November the Diocesan team were invited to a 'Gerbil' day at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church on Trafalgar Square. Gerbil? More of that later.

Anyway, as the day went by, at one point they briefly announced the 'top ten', those dioceses that were most successful in encouraging churches to take part. We were really honoured to hear that we actually came in first place; just ahead of our neighbours in Birmingham.

Our prize, was presented here by B2CS Chair (and Chief Exec of Southwell Diocese) Nigel Spraggins (left) to yours truly Richard Barrett, one of the team in Lichfield Diocese;

And the person nabbed to be behind the lens was the National Mission and Evangelism Advisor Revd Paul Bayes!

Yes, it was indeed a real Gerbil; 'Kevin', named I believe after Roland Rat's erstwhile sidekick. Meet the star of the piece;

Believe me that it took a lot of attempts to take that picture - he's a frisky little fellow!

My sister and I had a fun challenge on Thursday night making what we hope was good living conditions for the little nerk;


Which he seemed to enjoy exploring!


I hope you'll also be pleased to know that Kevin has now found himself a permanent home (my pooch Ben was VERY jealous that attention was diverted away from him!) - SuperKev will now be living with my cousin Jayne - and most importantly her little son Jacob, who is very excited at the prospect.

Anyway, why 'Gerbil'? Well, one of the things that I thought I'd never know or need to is that gerbils don't tend to fare too well on their own in the wild, and are always better in pairs; and hence as the key vision for B2CS is one person inviting another, it makes them a very suitable mascot for B2CS...

It also stands for the slightly shoe-horned acronism;
GEt
Right
Behind
It
err...
Love

Let's see if we can live up to that next year and stay in first place!

You can read up more on B2CS at
http://www.lichfield.anglican.org/chadnet/church-sunday