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A first for Youth in Aberdeenshire

Sunday 2nd November and the first of a new series of events for young people the in the North East of Scotland was held at Kemnay Parish Church Centre. Approximately 65 people attended the event which consisted of multimedia presentations, drama, some worship times and an address given by the speaker James Duce (see below). James spoke about the bible account of Jesus bringing back to life a young child who had died and explained how the message behind this story can apply to people today. He also challenged the people present to commit to following Jesus and living a life which witness to other about their faith. A number of young people responded to these challenges.


A key objective of the event is to provide young people with the opportunity to come to a church event which is less formal/traditional ans to engage in worship using a style which is more natural for them. The songs used are mostly written by contemporary christian song writers and a praise band led the worship times. There was also a drama sketch performed by a group of young people. Multimedia presentations were also used to get across the message for the evening.

Young folks attended from a number of churchs from the Aberdeen, Westhill, Alford and Kemnay areas. People who attended seemed to enjoy the experience and the organisers are planning to hold other similar events on the first Sunday of each month. There is a web site where information about the events is posted – see www.engageyouth.org.uk for more information.

Some of the young folks who attended the event. It was great to see young people coming along to church at this time when many young people feel that the church is outdated and no longer relevent to them.

Congratulations to the organisers – keep up the good work. It was also great to see a number of older people coming along to support the event by performing various tasks in the background.

Kemnay Kirk – Summer Picnic August 2007


Each year members and friends of Kemnay Kirk meet with the Kemnay Pleasure park to have some find, games and a barbecue. This year was no exception and once again the rain stayed off! Some readers might find this an interesting statement! Scotlands weather can be a bit unpredictable at times ;-).
We had a great time enjoying each others company, playing games ( the annual game or rounders was as competitive as always you might expect) and of course enjoyed a burger or two!!

You can look at some photos taken on the day by clicking here

Phils Baptism

Friday 1st June was a special day for my family. It was the day that my son Philip was Baptised. He decided that he wanted to be baptised but not using the normal method which is common in the Church of Scotland. Conventional service of this type are held in the church. Phils service started in the church and ended down at the River Don. Here are some pictures of the act of baptism – I will follow this post up with some further information.


Getting into the water – very cold!


Rev John Renton, Phil and me getting ready for the big moment.


Phil completely emersed


Job done.

A very happy and proud moment for all concerned.

More of this later 😉

Click here to see more Photos

Ruach Praise – the band

The Church I go to in Kemnay has recently published its Web site. I was asked to provide some information about the praise band (Ruach Praise) and its members so we had some photos taken and encouraged the band members to provide some text about themselves to complement the photos. It is interesting to observe how modest the band members are this is evident when you see that even after a few weeks I still not have a text contribution from each member! I decided to use iWeb to collect the information gathered and then to offer this web address to the church Webmaster. Having did this in a very rough and ready manner I passed the URL over and suggested that the site assets could be copied in to that appropriate format for the Church Web site. To my surprise, my site was simple linked to! This might be temporary measure – we’ll see!

Having now used iWeb – a free application from Apple I have been very impressed just how easy it has been to publish simple web sites. The product is fairly limited using a page template based method. The band web site actually started as a photo album in iPhoto. One click takes the data from iPhoto into iWeb ready for publishing through an easy to use template. The text can be added in iWeb. All of this takes only a few minutes to accomplish with no need at any stage to resort to html coding. You can view the church web site, click here, or go direct to the site I created, click here.