EASTER SUNDAY BALLOON LAUNCH

Awesome time on Easter Sunday morning. With around 450 of us at Central Hall we celebrated Easter together and then as part of the Hope 08 initiative we wrote our prayers for the city on tags and then attached them to balloons for a massive balloon launch.

By itself this would be pretty spectacular, but across the city a further 26 churches joined together and around 3000 balloons were released with prayers for the city at exactly 11.30am.

The timing had to be exact because nearby Southampton Airport were holding back planes until we had completed the launch. Just as well they were holding them back as quite a number landed on the airport runway (oops!) and had to be cleared away and others were seen hanging off St Mary's Stadium but most of the 3000 balloons made it a little further afield!!

Apart from the weather (which was pretty wet!), the balloon launch seemed a huge success all round the city - see more pictures here.

The only bizarre thing to this excellent story is how it came about:

I am sure that I saw it advertised on the Hope 08 website as a national initiative that all churches around the country would be doing on Easter Sunday. So, thinking this was the case I stood in front of a large number of church leaders across Southampton and sold it to them as that! Unfortunately when we had the list of 27 churches complete we contacted Hope 08 to let them know so they could add information to what was happening across the country. They were pretty impressed with what we were doing and thought it was a great idea, but no other churches were taking part across the country and they had never heard of the idea!!! OOOOPS!

Still it was a great idea (wherever it came from) and an opportunity to pray for the city together as churches. We also got a couple of photos on national news and some pretty good coverage in the local papers...