I have talked on and off and rather briefly about my involvement with Youth and as we started back for the year I want to re-introduce you to what’s gone on and what is happening.

Last year kicked off well, I became involved about three or four weeks in as a fill-in and shortly after joined the team as they were pretty desperate for female leaders. By the last term we were plodding through with much lower motivation and a more, ‘lets have fun’ mindset to the evening in a vain attempt to get a few more kids along. We hit an all time low with only four of the ‘most-regulars’ showing up on a Friday and figured we clearly weren’t doing something right.

Our church does not have a paid youth pastor position and to honest if it was financially possible, could probably use someone. Geoff does most of the heading up – he’s been involved for a long time and he would agree that he’s better suited to running Sunday morning youth (which he does a brilliant job on) than Friday nights. As it currently stands of us all involved make for good team players but no one (except possibly one of the other guys) is much of a position to take it all on board.

Geoff has been talking about giving up on attractional based youth which is very much the game plan for this year and a few months ago Soul Survivor called us up and volunteered to ‘run an evening’.

That eventuated last night.

I went down at 5:30pm to open up for them and after setting off the alarm…hohum. They asked me how many kids might show up, to which I replied, “Probably not that many”. I came back and felt decidedly not all that thrilled and really just, crap about the coming evening.

By the end of the evening we’d had ~15 kids show up, a really positive worship time and the kids ended up praying for the leaders, meaning we all split up. God was clearly doing something amazing, we had kids opening up a fair bit, taking risks in letting us know what they thought God was saying, really praying and some deep and significant questions being asked.

I managed to commandeer the three new year 7 girls and although a bit shy about the praying thing we had an insanely good chat from suffering to prayer to ‘weird stuff the Holy Spirit does’ to what we are to God to listening to Him. It was big and quite fun answering and letting them know what I thought.

We were all greatly encouraged and I think are beginning to feel like perhaps that with God we can actually do this thing. The kids are for in the most part at a point where this is altogether necessary – the ‘more fun’ aspect didn’t necessarily go to waste but it’s time has passed.

Please pray for the youth ministry, the kids and those involved in leading.