What a fantastic day!

I went up to London early this morning to start the day by meeting up with a great man, Ashton, and his son Craig from the Kennington/Crystal Palace area of London. We were meeting up to chat around some ideas of how YFC might support them in setting up some youth outreach.

These guys were so great. They had a great mix of passion for their community mixed with a real tangible wisdom. The passion was quite infectious and I found myself getting excited for an area I know nothing about and have been to only a couple of times when we used to pop up to Crystal Palace park to see the dinosaurs.

It was great to hear of Ashton and Craig’s plans and I am excited to think they could be starting something up in this part of London!

After saying bye to these people I met up with the London cluster. Again, a bunch of fantastic people who are all massively involved in excellent, innovative godly work amongst the young people of their communities. I thought how great it was to be associated with these people as each of them shared in turn what was happening and what they were currently involved in. It was all exciting stuff from working in football coaching schemes with young people, training youth leaders, developing projects with Street Pastors, developing schools work and setting up new things like breakfast clubs on estates.

I came away thinking what a ‘healthy’ (well…at least until we ate lunch!) bunch of workers these people are as, in reality, each of them was critically analysing what they were doing and asking that important question; ‘what or where next?’

Too often in youth outreach people avoid that question. It’s even easier to avoid it when, as with this group of workers, you are good at what you do and experience success. When things are going well you don’t want to ask the questions about ‘why’ and ‘should this continue’ and ‘what shall we do to progress’. Hard questions but questions that we always need to ask and answer if we are going to progress in our callings and fully experience our lives as God wants us to experience them.

As I returned on the slow train – deliberately to get ahead in my reading – I thought what a great day, 2 meetings, 2 groups of people sold on reaching young people in their area with the gospel. Amazing!

Actually, I am not sure which is more amazing – the fact that they all do this so well, or the fact that each of them thinks they are doing nothing particularly special or out of the ordinary!

Extraordinary!!!