How church had the back of a hurting community

How do you respond when young children are murdered in your community? Richard Vernon tells Chris Rolfe about Lakeside Church’s Blessing in a Backpack project

The fatal stabbings at a children’s dance workshop in Southport on 29 July made national headlines and devastated the North West’s seaside town, including Lakeside Church’s community.

Bebe King (six), Elsie Dot Stancombe (seven) and Alice da Silva Aguiar (nine) were killed, while ten others – eight of whom were children – were injured.

Then, with a shattered community in shock, riots erupted in the town just 24 hours later.

Lakeside Church was among neighbouring churches and organisations which leapt into action to support and rebuild in the immediate aftermath.

“We saw the best and worst of humanity within 24 hours and were out on the streets doing what we could to engage with anyone who needed help,” says pastor Richard Vernon. “We held a prayer vigil the night after the attacks and focused our next Sunday service on what had happened to give people hope; not just those from our church but people from the community too.”

In the months that followed, the need was no less great and Lakeside was keen to continue supporting the town in the longer-term aftermath.

That’s why it launched an ambitious project that blessed more than 6,400 primary school-aged children in October.

“We called it ‘Blessing in a Backpack’,” explains Richard. “The big, hairy, audacious goal was to give every primary school child in Southport a backpack full of goodies, along with some literature to communicate the message that God loves them and that we as the churches in the town are for them.”

With news of the attacks gripping hearts around the UK, the project quickly drummed up widespread support. An email to Gary Grant, owner of The Entertainer toy store network, resulted in Richard sourcing a mammoth haul of items at cost.

Scripture Union gifted 4,000 Diary of a Disciple booklets for the juniors’ bags, while just over 2,500 Happy Ever After books were sourced from Hope Together for the infants’ bags.

Then an appeal to Elim churches nationwide resulted in more than an incredible £28,000 being donated by over 70 congregations. Alongside donations from other organisations, individuals and churches from The Further Faster Network, and a huge donation of additional goodies to go into the bags from Liverpool One Church, the total raised reached £43,000.

With funding secured and the bags and their contents sourced there was then the small logistical challenge of packing 6,400 backpacks.

“We had pallets and pallets of stock delivered to the church – hundreds of boxes. I looked at it and wondered how we’d get through all of it,” says Richard.

“During the October half-term break we turned our auditorium into a production line. For the two and a half days it took to pack everything we had an army of volunteers from our church, other churches and organisations we work with, staff from The Entertainer, and people from the community who wanted to help.

“A storage unit then offered us space at little cost to store everything.”

The factory line assembled the backpacks, then Lakeside used its links with the Southport & Area Schools Worker Trust to deliver them to 20 schools and local home-schooling parents for distribution to the children.

“In the majority of schools we were invited into their assemblies. The school where my children went geared the whole assembly around our project,” Richard says. With 6,400 backpacks delivered, you might think some down-time was in order, but Richard is already considering whether blessing local children could become an annual missional event.

“Not on the same scale!” he explains quickly, “but what if every September we blessed every reception child starting school with a bag and a message to say God loves them and we are here for them?”

For now, though, he is hugely grateful for the overwhelming nationwide support he received to turn a small idea into a wide-reaching reality.

“God is so good and the response from across the Elim movement was incredibly significant in making this happen – we couldn’t have done it without them. We saw so much kindness, generosity and favour. I’m still pinching myself that we did it!”

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.