Highlight- Friday Hangs
One key highlight over Friday Hangs in June was the depth of gospel conversations with the local youth. This came about quite interestingly where one of our local high schools had an Athletics Carnival and so our team expected a drop in numbers. Whilst it felt quite discouraging to have 6 students show up, God gave me the idea to not do the Bible Story but instead give targeted questions to each of the students ie “Can good people go to heaven? Who is Jesus to you? and then work it out with a leader by the end of the night.
By God’s grace, this probably led to the best conversations that we’ve seen all year and encouraged our team to probe deeper with the youth who come! Please pray that God would give us wisdom on how to continue these on next term!
Challenge-Dealing with Disappointment 2.0
There were two key events that we were planning for during the month of June which were unfortunately spoilt during lockdown.
Camp Engage- this was a 4-day camp in June which our team had been working very hard towards for our youth especially in this month. Things seemed hopeful as we were allowed to be at the site over the first half of the weekend with lots of fun and games. The topic was on ‘Torn Identity’ which speaks about different things the youth can place their identity in ie possessions, family, friends and how they can ultimately find this in Christ.
My fellow MTSer Nathan Xing gave a faithful and edifying talk on ‘I am what I have’ regarding finding identity in possessions where there were really great discussions between the leaders and students. However just after lunchtime, we unfortunately had to make the call due to the lockdown that everyone needed to head home 😦
Winter Study Hall- this one has definitely felt like a rollercoaster over the past couple of months, with struggling to get school support, to having good conversations with local youth, to being okay with not reaching minimum numbers, to likely reaching the minimum number of students for it to run and then being cancelled due to COVID. This one interestingly didn’t feel like it hit as hard for me perhaps because I had mentally prepared for it at the beginning of June with that it might not run, but nevertheless disappointing.
However, throughout it all, God has still remained good. From Romans 8, we can expect to feel disappointed in this fallen world, we can groan alongside creation but we also know that there is a certain future hope that we have in Christ which outweighs any present disappointment. Although my teams were really crushed by the outcomes, we were thankful to God for the time that we did have with the youth as well as the learnings for the Winter Study Hall that we had! God willing, we’ll be able to run these two events later in the year!
The Marsden Fund 