For the past decade the Rev Heather Kennedy, a minister at First Church, Invercargill, has quietly been teaching, entertaining and encouraging young girls in Invercargill.
First Church established the girls’ club to ensure there was a club accessible to all girls, whatever their families’ financial circumstance. First Church covers all the costs, with no fees and no uniforms, though those who can afford it pay $1 towards activities.
The club in the past has had up to 25 members. At the moment, 14 girls aged five to 10 years attend, none of them being from church-going families. “They hear about us through friends of friends,” Heather says. “There’s only myself and two helpers who are older ladies running the club, so we cannot take on too many girls.”
To make room for new girls, members have to leave when they are near to 11 years old. “There’s lots of clubs and groups they can join, including the church youth group”.
The ongoing success of the girls’ club is down to “a programme that is less structured,” Heather says. “We try to do lots of different things; there might be craft, an outing, music, drama or games. We follow the Church calendar and always do something to mark Easter and Christmas, and we also mark other days.”
One such day is All Hallows Eve, when Heather and the girls can be found among the gravestones, candles in hand. “We’ve gone to the cemetery for two years now. The society we live in can treat the subject of death very unnaturally. For me, as someone who ministers at funerals, the opportunity to treat death in a healthy, balanced and open way is not to be missed”.
Heather says the girls take a wreath with them and lay it on the grave of someone they know who has recently died. “Someone will spot a gravestone and say, ‘I know that person’. The girls are surprised when they find contemporary gravestones made of glass or in the shape of a bike.”
Outings are the girls’ favourite activity, says Heather “and I enjoy taking them into the community as the little ambassadors of First Church”. The girls visit a rest home that Heather holds services at and take chocolate, fudge and biscuits they have made at the club.
“Cooking is always popular and can be combined with a game; the girls make pancakes then have a pancake race.”
Fundraising is another activity the girls are involved in. After a visit from “Bruce C Gull”, a seagull-costumed man who came to talk to the club about environmental issues, the girls decided they would sponsor Flight, a king parrot in the Queen’s Park Aviary. Each year the girls have sold firewood and pine cones, sold cheese rolls (the delicious rolled-up South Island version) and performed a mid-Winter play about Christmas trees to raise funds for the Aviary.
The importance of caring for the environment is something one of the Girls’ Club helpers, who works for the city council, has been sharing. The girls, including the five year olds, have been learning how to recycle.
“Recycling wasn’t something we would have done as an activity with the girls 10 years ago,” Heather says, but the strength of the First Church girls’ club is its ability to evolve.
“In the past we used to give the girls a snack because they would come to club hungry but we don’t see hungry kids anymore so we cut that back to just giving them a drink and a biscuit”. Heather says that the club needs to stay flexible and to listen to what the girls want from it, so that they can meet their changing needs and evolve intentionally. “If we are hearing the girls correctly, then I think that soon we will be finding ways to connect more with the schools.
“This year we will form a SuperKidz Club and invite both boys and girls aged between 6 and 12 years to attend. We hope this will include more Sunday School members and children from Invercargill Middle School, with whom we are forming an ‘Adopt a School’ relationship. The new SuperKidz Club will attract more helpers from within our congregation.”
By Angela Singer