Opening Doors

Christy and myself lead an outreach team around England just before Christmas, with our last location being Brighton. Before we went we had arranged a place to be able to stay cook etc. Sadly it all fell through with less than a week to go, so we were left in an unfortunate position of having to decide what to do as we were technically homeless for our last couple of weeks. So we did all we could do, we took some time with the team and spent time praying and listening to God. We felt God say that we should still go, and that we should spend the next 3 days fasting, so we did.

God is pretty amazing; in those 3 days we travelled to Brighton and spent time walking round the city asking God to open doors and where we should go. By the end of those 3 days we had somewhere to stay, somewhere to cook and somewhere to shower. God is so faithful.

I certainly experienced a new level of His faithfulness during these few days. As a team we followed what we felt he was saying to us and every time we knocked on a door it was opened to us and we had a positive response back. We felt very strongly we should be in Brighton and the only way we could have managed it on our budget was for God to open up places for us. I am so grateful for who He is and it made me think back on one of the last things Joshua said to Israel. “Now I am about to go the way of all the earth. You know with all your heart and soul that not one of all the good promises the Lord your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled.” (Joshua 23:14 NIV).

For Christy and myself it is also really exciting as we feel Brighton is somewhere God has called us to be long term, and this has helped us to connect with a number of new people in the city. Which is something else we have been praying for. It felt like this was a push for us to see something happen in Brighton, It felt like our time shifted something for us in what we feel God has called us to do.

Graduating the July DTS 2014

Christy and myself have had the pleasure of leading a Discipleship Training School (DTS) here at Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Holmsted Manor over the second half of 2014. We had the amazing privilege of getting to graduate 10 trainees just before the Christmas break. Each of them have had their own journey of faith which brought them to the school, and have spent the last 6 months exploring faith in a deeper way, spending time getting to know Jesus better, and then going out and sharing this with others around England.

We are very blessed to have been able to be apart of this journey and have watched each and every trainee come into a much greater place of freedom with Christ. I have been involved in a number of schools now and God continues to surprise me with his faithfulness to meet each and every person where they are at and draw them into one of the greatest adventures of life.

I am always so grateful for what has happened when I reflect back on a school once we have graduated them. God is so amazing and I can not imagine a better way to spend my life than walking a journey with him.

Outreach to many places

Christy and Myself had the great pleasure of being able to lead a group of 18-30 year olds on an 8-week mission trip around England just before Christmas. This was the outreach phase of the Discipleship training School that we were leading.

We spent time both as a whole team and as 2 smaller teams in 6 different cities around England, spending time in Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle, Cambridge, Luton and Brighton.

It was such an incredible 8 weeks, we really saw God move in both our lives and the lives of people we met along the way. We got to be apart of 12 people’s first steps into a relationship with Jesus; we got to see a number of people healed by God of a variety of physical injuries as well as emotional healing. As a team we spent lots of time in intercession and worship seeking God and listening to him. This is one of the things that got us excited to go and speak with people as we felt God was leading.

One of my favourite stories of someone meeting Jesus for the first time came from Newcastle. Some of the team were out in the streets asking God who to talk to and felt they should go into John Lewis and speak to one of the people working in the store. They got to tell her all about who Jesus was and at the end of the conversation she asked how she could know Jesus, so they prayed with her and she got to meet Jesus right there in the store. We also connected her with a church that we had been working with so that she could continue to ask questions once we moved to our next location.

We did a range of different things in the different cites, ranging from helping in a youth club in one of the most deprived areas of Newcastle to various homeless and refugee ministries to engaging people on the street with a chalk board and a question to going to the local café’s and listening to God for those around us and sharing what we felt God was saying for them.

Sharing with people what we felt God was saying for them was probably one of our favourite ways of  talking to people and sharing Jesus with people. It led to a lot of deep conversations. One of my favourite stories involved two of our team and a woman in a cafe in Manchester. The Girls had spent some time praying and writing down what they felt God had said, and just when they felt they were done listening the Lady got up to leave. So they ran after her and explained who they were and what they were doing. After the woman had read what they wrote, she asked if they wanted to go for a walk with her. As they walked she told them her story and how she had met God when she was rescued from being trafficked. She was in a place of real despair when they came up to her, and she told them that everything they had written was exactly where she was at and the journey she had walked and the hopes she had for the future. They talked and prayed with her for long time before finally parting ways. She said that if they had not come to her at that time she was ready to give up, but that by them being obedient and reaching out to her they had been able to rekindle purpose in her life. They have kept in touch and continue to talk and pray about who God is with her.

The team with a 4 of the people we worked with in Cambridge

Overall we had an amazing time with the team and watched them grow in such a love for Jesus and each other. God did so much over this time and it gets me excited to continue to live this out in my daily walk. To think about all God has done in me and in those I have met in these last few years I cannot think of anything I would rather do tan what I do at the moment.

A week out

We got to take the current DTS (Discipleship Training School) that we are leading to Cambridge last week for a week of teaching and sharing the story of Jesus on the streets.

It was a really significant week for the group for a number of different reasons. Firstly it helped to deepen the friendships between us all, to help gel us together as a community. Secondly it helped us to be able to challenge some of the heart attitudes that are in all of us. Thirdly it helped to build confidence in our trainees, from not feeling like they would be able to talk to anyone, to being able to approach people and get into conversations with.

We had teaching in the mornings from a lady in YWAM who spends most of her time talking with people and sharing who Jesus is and what he has done with them. We then spent the afternoons on the streets of Cambridge close to the University talking with people. We had a range of different experiences, which is normal, from people who did not want to hear anything and would tell us to go away, to people who really wanted to talk and hear what we were saying. We used a coloured bracelet as a tool to help tell the gospel story. Over the week we had 11 people commit their lives to Jesus and Connie, the lady we were with, spent time with each making sure they got connected to a church or other people who know Jesus.

All in all we had a great week, and it has built excitement for the outreach of the school, which we will be doing in October through to December.

Creative Intercession

As a YWAM (Youth With A Mission) Community we greatly value hearing Gods voice. One way we do this is spend time together as a community each week and spend time interceding for the things that God talks to us about the world.

Last week when we did this, we got out the Giant world map that we have and God started to talk to us about world Hunger, so we decided to be creative in the way we prayed and put food in different areas of the map. As we prayed and listened to God together we moved this food around as a symbolic act of what we were praying about.

This is just one of the many ways we spend time as a community praying for the world, we love it so much we do it every week, with different focuses. Christy and me are both part of the small team, which helps to lead these times and facilitate for others who also have something they want to lead us in prayer for. We really value partnering with God and hearing his heart for this world, and the intercession times often lead us to do more as a community.