God goes on holiday in the summer

"I hate the summer - God goes on holiday every year".

The comment caught me surprise. As someone who has a relatively busy lifestyle - and no children - I quite look forward to the summer months. Fewer meetings, more BBQs - an outside chance that the weather might just be warm enough to get a small tan. The weeks when school is out bring a welcome change to the pace to life - a chance to spend more time enjoying my relationship with God without the hamster wheel of responsibilities that crowd most other months. But not everyone feels that way.

There are those who are elderly and frail - those who only leave their home to go to church events or a medical appointment. As summer approaches, they don't see "holiday" they see a 6-week gaping hole in their diary that increases isolation and intensifies their pain.

There are those school teachers who reach the end of term in a state of exhaustion but suddenly find themselves with evenings free. For once they are in a state to go to home group feeling awake ... but home group has stopped.

There are the socially isolated - those with profound mental health struggles, the refugees and asylum seekers who have urgent needs but who suddenly find their support structures reduced as key families flee to the beach.

There are those students who return home fired up for the Lord after an excellent term at CU (or guilty about the fact they haven't found a church to get into yet) only to discover that the groups they used to love at their home church aren't meeting. It's so much harder to get back involved.

And then there are those families who simply find the lack of structure in the summer holidays that bit too hard. Lack of money, lack of energy, lack of key relationships make it hard to find the focus to each day that keeps the children occupied.

For people like this, it can seem very much as if God goes on holiday ever summer.

They're not making a theological point. Clearly the Lord is omnipresent every day of the year! But the opportunities to learn about him, meet with his family all too often dwindle to next to nothing.

So this year, why not think creatively about the summer months? It doesn't need to be the same people running summer events as those who run the term-time events (it's fine to take a break!). But how about asking a couple of mature Christians in the congregation to run something simple over the school break. Here are a few ideas:

• Summer book group: meet for 6 weeks to read through Serving without Sinking or Mirror, Mirror or anything else for that matter!
• Picnic in the park: 6 Tuesday lunchtimes where anyone in the church family is welcome to meet in a local park to enjoy a bring and share lunch and some simple games and songs.
• A summer home group: 6 stand-alone sessions looking at key doctrines by working through a creed or digging into the lives of some of the lesser known Bible characters.
• History hunter: 6 opportunities to look at different periods of the church, discovering what we can learn from each.
• Tea and testimony afternoons: 6 tea and cake afternoons where people are encouraged to share what God has been doing in their life recently.
• Burning questions: 6 sessions in a local coffee shop or pub where church members and their friends can come along and ask any questions they like about Christianity.
• Poppadoms and prayer - 6 evenings where people can drop in to the church hall, grab a bowl of curry and pray with a brother or sister in Christ about a challenge they are facing.

The options are endless ... It can be anything that provides a simple opportunity for God's people to meet and glorify him over the summer weeks. So why not give it a go? And make sure everyone in your congregation knows that the church community function 52 weeks of the year, not just 46.