Next Sunday will see a special Churches Together Pentecost service take place outdoors on Bromley Common to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit. It will be intergenerational and interdenominational, and two people who will be there, come rain or shine, are Jess Jenner, children and families worker and Parenting for Faith champion, and Verity Mitchell, BRF Ministries trustee. The service was pioneered last year, and it was such a success that they’re doing it all again. ‘It was really exciting,’ says Jess, ‘though we learned a few things, like having to tie everything down because it was so windy!’
1 June 2025
The Holy Spirit in the everyday
Jess works for Jubilee church in Bromley, part of the Pioneer Network, but she is also well known for writing her own resources for families, teachers and churches. This is an area she got into because ‘I could never find resources that did what I wanted.’
From the start, when she was looking for resources she couldn’t find, it was the theme of the Holy Spirit Jess wanted to explore. Why?
Because I don’t see the point in children discovering God but not actually experiencing God. That’s what draws us in. As a young person, what impacted me most was going away to Christian camps and those moments when the Holy Spirit came and moved in power. But we don’t need to wait till we’re teenagers and away from our churches to experience that. I want to encourage children – and adults! – to have those moments and not as a one-off experience, but rather to know for themselves that they can experience the Holy Spirit in their everyday life.
I don’t see the point in children discovering God but not actually experiencing God.
The helper
So how has Jess approached the themes of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit?
I come back to the fact that Jesus described the Holy Spirit as a helper. Sometimes the Pentecost story might be a little bit scary. It’s fire and wind, and people not really knowing what’s going on. But the outcome of Pentecost is all these people hearing the good news and responding to it.
The Holy Spirit can do crazy and miraculous things outside our understanding, but there are so many different ways to connect with the theme and they all come back to the fact that this is something for us now, today. It’s not something that happened as a one-off a long time ago. Those gifts of the Spirit were not just for then; we can experience them now.
One of the Pentecost activities Jess created was based on the crown of flames – ‘kids love making crowns with flames on them!’ They wrote the names of the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit on the flames, to represent all the different ways that the Holy Spirit can help us and equip us for mission. Again, says Jess:
The essence of it is that we can encounter the Holy Spirit today. That helper is still with us today and that doesn’t always look like flames on our heads: sometimes that looks like having the right words to share with your friend when they’re upset. It’s all about making it applicable.
The essence of it is that we can encounter the Holy Spirit today. That helper is still with us today.
Pentecost on the Common
For last year’s Churches Together service the worship team came from different churches. Some of the Jubilee families and young people led some actions with the songs. The nephew of one of the musicians also joined on drums.
He can’t have been more than 10, and he was amazing!
We had goodie bags for families, and they all had windmills in them, like you get at the seaside. When they held them up during worship the wind blew and you got an amazing sound and a real sense of flickering flames as the windmills whirled round.
It was such a lovely experience to see so many different churches and so many different ages all celebrating together, which is why we’re doing it again this year!
A new addition for this year will ensure that the service is accessible to as many people as possible. Jess has created special ‘widgets’, as part of a visual timetable in the order of service, which will help people with additional needs to participate more fully in all the activities.
BRF Ministries trustee Verity Mitchell is a member of the Anglican St Augustine’s parish church on the edge of Bromley Common, where the service takes place. She’s also really looking forward to this year’s interdenominational service:
I’ll be leading the music, and Jess and I have planned to use more participative action songs. They’re a way brilliant of involving everyone in worship, young and old!
And the Pentecost celebrations don’t begin and end on Bromley Common. Verity says:
We’re also running Messy Church for Pentecost. We find that Messy Church brings in new people to celebrate the major church festivals, especially from our toddler group. We’re great fans of BRF Ministries and it’s one of the charities St Augustine’s supports from our ‘Away Giving’ fund. It has so many resources to offer churches.
We find that Messy Church brings in new people to celebrate the major church festivals, especially from our toddler group.
A normal approach
A week before this year’s Churches Together service, Jess’ desk is piled high with paper flames and shiny windmills.
What, for Jess, is the key thing she’d like people to take away with them from the service?
I think sometimes people get a bit nervous talking about the Holy Spirit with children because they think they need to create these moments of deeply spiritual encounter. But actually, if we expect God to be with us and the Holy Spirit to be with us, you can have encounter in every part of your service or your Sunday school or Messy Church. You can connect with God while you’re doing a craft and while you’re playing a game, playing the drums or spinning a windmill. With Parenting for Faith’s Chat and Catch tool you can pause in the middle of a game and go, ‘Oh, I wonder, should we invite God to be with us and share this fun?’, or, ‘I wonder how God feels when we play.’
That just makes it normal. Of course, we don’t want to lose the sense that the Spirit is supernatural and amazing and God is incredible, but the reality is that the people who were there at Pentecost didn’t stop hearing from God and speaking in tongues and using the gifts of the Spirit: doing those things became part of their everyday toolkit. So what I would love is for Pentecost not to be that one Sunday of the year when we talk about the Holy Spirit doing amazing things, but to be the catalyst for this becoming our normal way of approaching things.
