Families@4 is a new worshipping community at St Peter’s Church in Ipsley. Throughout 2026, they decided to theme their programme around nature, the environment and learning about God’s creation and have created a community garden in which the children and their families are growing vegetables and flowers.
The Families@4 group meets at 4pm on the first Sunday of the month with a core of around 10 – 12 children attending. The session starts with songs, there is a bible study, which is sometimes acted out by the children, and interactive prayers as well as a craft suitable for all ages.
Assistant Curate, Linda Nicholas, said: “It started as something to invite our baptism families to and we’ve found that they’ve stayed, which is brilliant. In the past, we’ve done a different theme each month, but we wanted to create something which they could own and came up with the idea of a garden which fit with a year of focussing on caring for God’s creation.”
Raised beds have been installed in the churchyard and the church applied for a Kingdom People Fund grant which enabled them to buy aprons, gloves and gardening tools for the children to use. The eco theme will be continued through the year with sessions covering things like national ocean day and churchyard nature scavenger hunts as well as working on the garden.
“Everyone is very enthusiastic about working on the garden and they are very proud of it,” continued Linda. “The designed their own sign, which has been kindly produced for free by a local company and we’ve now planted lettuce, carrots and peas as well as flowers.
The plan is to share the harvest among those who attend later on in the year!”
The church is also hoping that this will kickstart work on an Eco Church award.
