Westpoint

We travel down to Exeter today to pray and seek God for the Together at Westpoint event that will be taking place on the 18th-21st August.

The event was renamed and had a new venue (the Westpoint arena) last year after two years joining together for Accelerate. Last years event was a huge success seeing 1800 people join together from all over the region to worship and seek God. 


This years event is looking to be even bigger and better. Phatfish will be joining us as will Terry Virgo. We will also have some local worship bands serving us as well as the usual dynamic preaching that Guy Miller brings. On top of this we can be confident that God wants to meet with us and give us vision and direction as a region! Westpoint isn't one to miss out on, make it your priority for this summer!

Super Sunday

Easter Sunday...one of the main days in the christian calender! And what a day to baptise so many people! 

I was back at Winchester Family Church (my previous church) and what a joy it was to witness the baptism of 10 people! I don't know about you, but hearing testimonies of how God works in peoples lives and brings them to salvation in him really causes emotions to fly---I didn't cry this time. 

It just seems fitting on a day when we are celebrating the day when our saviour was raised from the dead that we baptise people. Baptism is an outward expression of an inward faith in Christ. It also gives us an image of dieing to your old life (as you go under the water) and being raised to new life as you come back out of the water.

Like Christmas, Easter has been hit by commercialisation. Chocolate eggs are great but lets remember and celebrate for the real reason. Jesus is alive!

Holiday Time

It has been a while! This past term of Impact has been the most hectic one yet which means blogging has shot right been the list of things to do. It is nice to be back writing and I hope that I will get some more inspiration soon.

Anyway, I am currently taking a week off from Impact and I am back in Winchester. The weather is beautiful! I have had opportunities to catch up with friends and spend the day with my cousins which was great. It has been nice to shut down for a week before I head back to Poole to take on the last term of Impact. 

Last week we had our Easter holiday club. Over the course of the week we had 100 children join us for gospel centred stories, messy games, worship, the extremely popular drama, walk the plank (where the losing teams leader was pushed into the baptismal pool) and lots more pirate based fun.
Holiday club is an amazing week of the church calender. The whole church unites in prayer leading up to the event, up to 20 people join together as the core team and we get to invite so many young people and their families into the church building. 
We are continuing to pray as we seek to see some of these families attending the church and ultimately having faith in the Jesus.

In Bude Review

What a weekend! 300ish students and 20's gathered together In Bude to worship God and spend time in fellowship together! In my pre-event post I noted how expectant we were and boy, God just loves to blow away expectations!

Friday evening set the tone for the weekend! We spent an hour and a half worshipping and then Matt and Grace shared on how we can get the most out of the weekend. Ben and the band led us fantastically, and I loved his new songs! 

Saturday was where it all kicked off! Julian Adams led the two sessions, and those of you who know Julian will know that any meeting that he speaks at is an eventful one. He spoke from Luke 7:36-50. God then proceeded to speak to him about certain individuals around the room and he went on to prophecy over them. 

Saturday evening for me was the highlight of the weekend which is funny because I spent the whole meeting on the floor...unable to move. God met with me in the most powerful/tangible way he ever has done and he spoke to me about some personal stuff as well. I know many people were blessed by God in this meeting! Isn't he good?!

Sunday morning...the weekend had gone so quick, but we still had one more meeting to look forward to. Matthew Hosier spoke from Daniel 3, a message he bought at the last ever Stonleigh event in Revive, ten years ago. The message was very powerful and Matt challenged us about putting God first in every area of our life and not conforming to the world while still being in the world. 

In Bude went as well as it possibly could have done. It must be repeated next year. The amount of blessing and fruit that has come out of it is phenomenal. Students and 20's, stay on fire for God as we integrate back into normal church life, lets be a blessing to our congregations!

In Bude

This weekend we will be joining with other students from the south-south west region In Bude. The weekend will be a great opportunity for worship, fellowship and to hear great preaching. We are privileged to have Matthew Hosier and Julian Adams sharing from God's word, and one of Gateway Church Poole's bands---being led by Ben Green---leading us in our worship.

We are expecting God to meet with us powerfully, and really speak into our lives. A lot of us have big decisions to make after this year whether it be moving on to university or moving into the working world. So please be remembering us in your prayers.

Glimpses of 2003

Those of you who know me will know I love Rugby. I have played the game for 8 years and I am also a keen watcher of the game---when England are playing well! And boy, are they playing well!

Englands Chris Ashton

Wales put up a good fight and made it tight until the end, although they wern't clinical when it mattered. England however were. We made the most of the opportunities we got and in the end that is all that matters. Chris Ashton showed more signs of promise with two tries to his name and Toby Flood was solid with the boot.


Next was Italy. Now, I'm a big fan of Italy. They have a lot of promise and have steadily improved over the years. The problem is, they don't have strength in depth. There team is dotted with star players but as we know a few stars can't win you the game. Sergio Parisse the Italian No.8 & captain could earn a place in any side in the world, and as England piled on the points you could see his frustration...I felt for him.

Sergio Parisse being tackled by Ben Foden

 In a game like the one against Italy, it is very easy to focus on the scoreline and completely forget about the negatives. And don't get me wrong, there were a lot of positives to take away however lets not get over excited because there is still a lot of work to be done. We made some silly errors and at times lacked discipline. Against a better team we would ahve been punished more severely that we were. New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and even an on form France would have made a lot more of the opportunities we gifted Italy.

Italy should not have scored their try either! We essentially gifted them. We looked week as the Italians pushed us over our own try line after they formed a maul from a line-out. Fabio Ongaro the replacement hooker went over for an easy try. This is surprising because for so long the maul was the strongpoint of the England game & we could match any team in the world for strength.  


Negatives over. I was very pleased with our work in attack. Ashton & Cueto really stuck out in my opinion. It was encouraging seeing them come off their wings and taking the ball on the inside shoulder of flood. In open play as well, whenever a break was made Ashton was right there ready to take the pass and go in under the posts. Support play is what we need, and this is something that Ashton has learnt from his days at Wigan in Rugby League.


I was impressed at seeing glimpses of the team we had in 2003. We have a long way to go if we want to challenge for the World cup but there again when Clive Woodward took over he went through a period of struggle and was nearly fired and then went on to build arguably the best team the world has ever seen.

2003 world cup winning squad on their tour of London.

If we can beat France at Twickenham on Saturday then we will be in with a great chance of winning the Grand Slam for the first time since 2003. We have the potential, lets just hope we don't choke under the pressure.

 

Spirit filled children...

God is seriously amazing! I thought I had a grasp of this prior to Sunday, it seems not! As some of you would have seen from my twitter post, this Sunday we were teaching on the Holy Spirit in our kids work at church. 

Anyway, after doing a quick question & answer session, we went into a prayer time and God really started to move amongst the children. I have never seen this before and found it an amazing experience. What blew me away even more was when God started to speak to them through pictures. Some of the stuff that came up was extremely powerful and even ended up being shared in the main meeting.

It was great to see God use children so powerfully! I know my prayer will be to see more and more of this not only in our children's work here in Poole, but in children's work throughout our nations and the nations around the world.