Nantes Go Team 2009

This year, the Nantes Go Team was held from 4th-13th April. The team members were Alan Ball (leader), Elyse Allen, Howard Allen, Erin McCollum, Hannah Drennan, Ali Rolleston and myself. As in other years, the primary work of the team was distributing Réflexions, a leaflet written by Malcolm Ball with various articles in it, as well as contact details for the Church. Read it here if you’re interested. We had around 34,000 to give out, and there were not many left when we left.

In terms of population, Nantes is pretty similar to Belfast, both with around 275,000 people, but, according to Wikipedia anyway, Nantes is about twice as densely populated with 4,318 people per km², compared with only 2,415 in Belfast. The solution to this problem..?

Lots and lots of apartments. The areas of the city we covered were full of apartments, and this certainly makes for quick distribution. We could probably have all spent the week doing this and not have covered them all.

There was also a fair bit of housing on the outskirts the city.

Another great thing about France is that letterboxes are much more easily accessed than in Northern Ireland. You can almost walk down a street putting in leaflets without breaking step. It’s great.

C’est mignon

As well as distributing in the city, we were also in some of the surrounding towns such as Orvault and La Chapelle.

Chez McFarland apparently..

After worship on the first Sabbath, there was a Church lunch held in a building close by to the Church. Afterwards a few team members were asked a few questions about their faith by Malcolm, and those attending were then given the chance to ask questions.

The room where services are held

Wednesday morning was rained off, so this paved the way for an epic game of Monopoly which wasn’t finished until 2.15am (although we were not playing the whole time..). Ali won, with total assets of £16,127.

Ali’s assets/the bank..

On Wednesday evening the annual soirée was held. We had a quiz with various novelty rounds as well as the usuals, which were interspersed with musical pieces and couple of sketchs, some of which you can watch below..

On the whole the night went down well, around 40 people turned up, most of them having little or no Church background.

Friday night was the the teenagers club. After playing games for a while (including pomme pomme pomme!) we were asked questions about Christianity in school and things like that. Makes you appreciate just what a blessing it is to go to a school that has other Christians and SU and so on, none of the kids there knew any other Christians in their school.

There was a rapper in our midst..

On a typical day we were out from 9.30-1.00, back for lunch, and then out again from 3.00-6.o0. Each evening we had a Bible Study which Alan led. The theme for the week was Work Songs, looking at psalms and how we can apply them to the situations we find ourselves in on a daily basis. I found these to be very helpful.

For our afternoon off on Saturday we were let loose on the centre of Nantes..

A mechanical elephant..whatever next

Other craic..

Yeoo

I like this street..

“Live your baptism”. Interesting idea..

Baptists..

On the way home, Alan got a bit lost..

This could be us outside Disneyland

“This looks quite different to last time….oh”

Safely back in rainy Belfast

Go to Nantes if you get the chance. It was a great experience and really interesting to see how God is working in France.

AK report on the 2008 team (from the Salad days..)