Beer, wine, curry & McCurrie

Around 250 visitors from the Southampton community came out for the kick-off event to June’s Real Life outreach programme.

Billed as ‘A Year in a Day’ and intentionally scheduled to take place before the easing of restrictions, the afternoon was a chance for local children – with their parents – to experience what they had missed out on during lockdown: pancake day, birthday party games, bonfire night, and Christmas cheer. The climax was Easter and an activity which illustrated the truth of the resurrection.

An adult quiz night followed a few days later, with church members encouraged to form teams of six with friends and colleagues around a local college sports hall.

The events week itself (6–13 June), organised by Christ Church Southampton, featured a TED-talk-style event at the nearby university concert hall (‘Is Christianity Credible?’), a beer and curry evening, and a women’s wine-tasting event. These led into evenings with former terrorist Billy McCurrie (‘Real Change’); mental-health author Helen Thorne (‘Real Mess’); and cancer-sufferer Jeremy Marshall (‘Real Hope’); and, finally, a Sunday service featuring the first nine of 12 baptisms the church has planned for the month.

The theme throughout was the ‘Real Life’ found in Jesus, with speaker Neil Powell expounding passages from John’s Gospel over the week.