Category Archives: yfc

Travels

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I will be away for a few days.
I leave in the morning at around 5.20am to get to YFC head office for some meetings. I hope to beat the traffic and find somewhere for breakfast!
Tomorrow night I am going to shoot across to Nottingham and stay with good friend Chris and catch up there.
On Wednesday I am back at Head Office to plan some mission stuff before heading back home sometime Wednesday afternoon I hope.

I think I’ve done too much driving of late and I’m looking forward to a Christmas break!

The Inspector is Coming

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You may have noticed posts have been short an infrequent recently.

This is due to the DfES deciding they want to do a monitoring visit to look at the young offender and pre-offending project that they have given us a grant for. The funding means we can do exciting things with Reflex and Energize.

In essence this is very similar to an OFSTED visit that a school would get. The main differences are we receive one inspector that myself and a friend will spend 2 or 3 hours with looking at progress and how we monitor and assess what is happening, with the ultimate sanction being a withdrawal of funding for next year. That won’t happen – but I have found it quite an interestingly stressful exercise. I have spent most of this week collating information and writing reports in the format that they want to receive it in. All other work, and study, has had to be put on hold to enable this to be done. Bizarrely we make a quarterly report – so packing information out has been weird as we have submitted vary detailed reports.

After 3 full days last week I think I now have everything I need to send to the DfES before they visit in January. If it takes that long for one project, no wonder head teachers get stressed when they get the phonecall!

I had planned this term well – I had intended to have all work and essays done by Dec 18th so I could enjoy the holiday with the family as I have not been around much this term. I had quite a strict timetable to help this happen.

Sometimes, though, plans have to be laid aside for the sake of the immediate. Often this has happened because people need support, but I find myself unusually stressed by this because paperwork has had to be put on hold for more paperwork as we live in a world now with little trust, and a world that depends not only on targets being met, but a world where we need evidence of the meeting too.

A bit more trust and belief in the truth of our quarterly reports wold men we could do a lot more work!

Thankfully this tarhet culture has not hit churches yet – but beware … I reckon it’s coming!

Mission chats – but I’m still shallow!

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Back in London today for the Youth Co-ordinating Group of CTIE and to catch up with Pauline in Solid YFC.

The meeting this morning was quite productive – although I am finding myself getting impatient in meetings who seem to like to talk over and over the same issues. Part of me wants to scream and say … ‘we’ve talked about this quite a lot – can we get on with mission now please?!’

I learnt of an exciting idea to give a more positive view of young people in the media – watch this space!

I met Pauline at The Boathouse next to Putney Bridge for a coffee and chat. It’s a great location wth an amazing view. Coffee is quite good too!

Following that I had to tackle the throngs of people in Regent Street and Oxford Circus possibly hunting for a present – but I can’t say more cos they might read about it here!

I noticed one interesting thing about me! A whole day talking about mission and wanting to reach people – but feeling anger rising inside me when people stp in the middle of pavements or top of stairs leaving tube stations! Reminds me how shallow I am!

Art of Connecting in Plaistow

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I was involved in some of the teaching of AOC in Plaisow on Saturday.

The Whole, part of Transform Newham, held this one day conference for young people who wanted to think more about sharing their faith. The day was fantastic and it was exciting to engage with these wonderful young people.

One young womans comment will stay with me for a while. After someone asked the question ‘when was the last time you shared your faith?’, she answered that she was shocked when she thought about it, because she had not shared her faith for at least …. 2 weeks!!!!

I think I must have met an evangelist!

3 days of quiet -ish

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I’m off in the morning with the other ‘leaders’ of YFC for our annual senior managers retreat at the nunnery in Nympsfield.

I love this place. The nuns are lovely and look after us well, the place is very quiet and its quite comfortable which means getting into the ‘reflective’ mood is quite easy.
I love this place because as well as retreating to be with God, we laugh a lot together. It’s cool as we all get on really well – I guess we are united in our desire to see individual lives transformed.
I love this place because in the evenings we can drink a great real ale called Pigs Ear! In my book its second only to Old Speckled Hen.

long day in London

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I had a longish day in London yesterday, where things kind of blur and if I am honest, it has hard to get my head around work things today due to that.

I started with a meeting at Monmouth Coffee Company then moved along the river to the Tate Modern to meet up with some SITC people along with Ian from Hope 2008. I managed a quick look in on the Fischli and Weiss exhibition beofre moving off to meet Richard from my management meeting.

I had arraned to meet Richard at the Scooter cafe but it was closed for decorating so we carried along the road to Church.co.uk for coffee where we bumped into lots of other people.

Following that I headed off to CMS to meet with the London YFC directors (good to be able to say a quick hello to Jonny)before Debbie James then ran an excellent session on cross cultural awareness in mission. The Mil-ers seemed engaged all the time as this was very relevant to them – as it is to all of us, all the time.

We decided to phone in pizza half way through the session – but finding a pizza delivery to deliver to Waterloo after 6 pm proved to be my hardest mission ever. In the end, Richard had more success than me!

The good thing about leaving London later is that you know there will be space on the train and I was able to catch up on some Euthansia reading for some assignment that I am supposed to be doing sometime!

Highlights of the day:
people
laughter
visions
dreaming
food

lowlights:
none

Tonight, though … 007 – hope it’s good.

Forgotten treasure

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I was at the NCVYS chief executives meetings today – one of my responsibilities to represent YFC at.

There were a variety of exciting and important things on the agenda but one in particular, the Commission on Unclaimed Assets really amazed me. Unclaimed assets are those pockets of money that people have in bank accounts but have not been touched for a very long time – something like 15 years!

Apparantly, this is the amazing bit, 1 in 3 of us have dormant bank accounts which we have forgotton about and not touched. A conservative estimate is that these amounts could add up to something like £400 million!

£400 000 000 just sitting there, untouched, forgotten, accruing interest slowly.

The proposal is that this money be used to fund the gaps in the (what is becoming called the) 3rd sector. There will be good safeguards and if anyone comes back to claim their money they will have it – so this seems a no-risk, win-win scheme which an independant body is currently looking at. On the website there is an online consultation form to let the commission know your views – if inclined go there.

It’s amazing to think that there is £400m of forgotten treasure in the banks of the UK.

What other treasures have we forgotten about?
Family treausures – like time with loved ones?
Natures treasures – experienced when we step out of the cars, tubes, trains …
Spiritual treasures – like love of God and God’s love of us?
Ministry treasures – like our first love of being called?

Seems like whichever way we turn, whatever treasure it may be, humanity is good at forgetting.

Art of Conecting in Newham

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I travelled around only a little bit today.
After meeting up with Michael, the chair of trustees of Chilsehurst YFC I popped over to East Ham to meet with Liz from Transform Newham.

Early December we are working together to run an Art of Connecting conference with young people from Newham. I love Newham! I don’t know whay, or what it is about this place but I really enjoy being in ths borough and working with some of the people there. Not everyone agrees – Liz mentioned that in a certain newspaper’s national survey that Newham came out as the 4th worst place to live in the country. I don’t know why – well I guess I do with levels of violence and so on – but I, for one, simply love this area. I wonder what criteria has been used to decide which places are worse or better to live in? Doesn’t that kind of assume we all like the same sorts of places? If so, surely there is a social bias and judgement being displayed here?

Whatever – I’m quite excited about this conference and looking forward to spending the day there on December 2nd.

runners

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Technology means we alredy have pictures of our illustrious runners here.

Dublin Marathon

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Today, some of my friends are running the Dublin Marathon to raise funds for the new YFC trainig and office facility.
If you fancy sponsoring them, please go here.