Stroof, Friday was a long night!

It finally happened! On Friday night / Saturday morning we had our All-nighter. The aim of the event was to stay up all night (of course) to celebrate 300 years of God's goodness to our church by spending 300 minutes on activities dedicated to Him. A minute for every year, incase you hadn't figured that out.

The activites included dedicating our minds to God through a quiz, dedicating our bodies to God by getting a dance routine together, using our voices in a midnight praise session and the Sing Star showdown and using our acting skills as well.

Here's a few memories from the event.

We kicked off with the now infamous 'animal game' that was made legendary by Frank's monkey impressions ("silky marmite"). This short activity produced more in-jokes then I could ever do justice to here. "Creepy Creepy. Creepy Creepy". etc.




This is Trinity Baptist Church who kindly lent us their building, because our own church was full with our 300th anniversary exhibition.

Thank you Colin, Tim and everybody at Trinity who made this possible!









Everybody brought along a DVD and we democratically voted to watch Jonny English (worst film title in British cinema history says-a-me!), so thanks to Sam for bringing that along. We put it on at about 1.30am, and Ian fell asleep in front of it, ahhh bless!









Our thanks to Lionel Ritchie for providing the theme song to our dance routine. This was one of Sarah's ideas and it was a lot of fun. Thank you Sarah! We stood around in a circle and made up a dance routine one step at a time. Video evidence of it's brilliance will soon be availible on request (to Youth Alpha and F.B.I. members only, natch)






See that picture? That's the bloke out of Keane that is. No doubt he's singing "Everybodies Changing", AGAIN! One of the high points of the night was seeing everybody compete to see who could get the most points on Sting Star Rocks. One of it's low points was sitting through "Everybodies Changing" three times.... mind you the first performance was a crowd pleaser. Sarah judged our various efforts, and I had a go at "Boys are Back in Town" by Thin Lizzy - but didn't do to well. Ah well. Calum and Matt R were both very good. Yay them!
The best part of the showdown was hoping that Ian would wake up from his Jonny English-induced slumber to find himself surrounded by strangers singing Queen songs and not know whether he was still dreaming. Saddly he took it all in his stride, it turns out he's quite hard to confuse.










At midnight Simon D and Park_2002 led the little crowd in some very atmospheric worship songs (thank you both for that).
"Thank you"s to Rueben for typing up the song words and Chrissy for operating the powerpoint.
That's Simon in the photo with his band The Park Race. If you liked what you heard on Saturday then click here to visit their web page or click here to go to see their myspace profile.! (Yeh) Hey is my personel favourite. Click here to read a review of it by Rueben.







Toast. There's nothng quite like it. We finished off the night by eating breakfast together, having a mass tidy up and chucking Calum's orange cushion about. Lovely. Then we all went home and slept.

Thank you Park_2002 for buying the food and Fliss for cooking it, doing the washing up, cleaning and generally getting on and doing stuff behind the scenes. Thanks also to Malcolm and Keith (yes Keith, ANOTHER thank you!) for your guidance and help. With out you two.....
And one more special thank you goes to local business Dwight Sounds who provided all our live PA solutions at a very competetive price.


Ta'rah.