This weekend Churches Together Folkestone held a youth event at our church called "We Love Folkestone". It's basically a movement that encourages the young people of our town to show genuine kindness to the people in our community and put "love thy neighbour as thyself" into practice.
I felt very excited all this last week leading up to the event and really built up enthusiasm for it because I knew that this Saturday night was going to be the beginning of something that Folkestone may not have ever seen before.
So last night it happened. I was so psyched and even managed to get Jim, our youth leader, to use the word "enthusiastic", too. We decked our church hall bar with cookies and Diet Coke expecting it all to vanish down the throats of loads of passionate, on-fire-for-God teenagers in the blink of an eye.
Seven o'clock came and like, barely anyone had arrived. Our speaker was present, the band was ready, but no kids had arrived yet. Quarter past seven... maybe two or three young people. At this point it was so hard not to have this kind of attitude towards the people who had not come:
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| Any "A Cinderella Story" fans out there? |
Now that gif is a bit exaggerated, but seriously, I was a bit confused as to why no one was showing up. It was going to be the youth event of the season! We were gonna change Folkestone together, hand-in-hand! How could we do that if barely anyone came?! Regardless of how few of us had come, we opened in prayer and the band got up and led us in worship for 30 minutes or so.
MAN.
Like, everyone was getting into it. And not like, "Oh my word, this worship is totes making me feel psyched for Jesus, man. I feel so good about myself right now, dude. Look at me being filled by the Spirit!"
But as we sang songs of praise, the room filled with love - a love that remains even if we don't, a love that causes us to overcome our fears in order to reach a loveless community, a love that moves us to touch the untouchables... a love that applies to us as individuals and the community as a whole. That room filled with God's love.
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| "When two or three meet together..." |
After worship a guy called Dave Pickett came up to speak. If I'm honest with you, I was expecting some older fellow with 20 years experience in youth work to come up and talk to us, but actually this guy Dave was not much older than than the rest of us and I found his challenge to missions very inspiring. He encouraged us to look for opportunities in our communities among the people we know to be Jesus to, but he also challenged us to let any ministry we partake in to start in our hearts.
Missions is not missions without Jesus because without Jesus, there is no missions. And our community can only encounter Jesus if we encounter Him first on a personal level.
Only about 10 youth came in all (not including youth leaders/workers). After Dave's talk we split up into groups and starting discussing what issues the young and old of our town are facing and what we could do to help them.
I loved our group of seven. All together we represented three different churches and for me, this is what last night was all about: the churches coming together with our town's need for Jesus as our focus. When the time came to turn our attention back to the stage, our group had come up with a very cool idea of how to reach our town. During our discussion on what the needs of the young and old in our town are we came across to one issue that pertained to both parties: the need to be listened to and supported.
We came up with an idea to put a sofa in the middle of town centre and serve free teas and coffees and invite people to sit down and have a chat with us. It would be a place where people could come and share their thoughts, problems and stories.
We want the way Folkestone views teenagers to change and this sofa idea may be one of the first steps towards that. All these ideas are yet to be put into practice, so I'll keep you up to date with what comes as a result of last night.
I don't mind that only 10 kids showed up. I think it's important for relationships to be built between us as youth groups and small numbers allow that to happen. Eventually this movement will grow and, I hope, infect the rest of the youth in our town. Even if it's slow to begin with we can be sure that God is at work in the hearts of our young people, moulding them into people who will touch their communities with Christ's love.
We love Folkestone and we want to see it change.
How? Only by love, only with God.
"We Love Folkestone" facebook page here.
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