INTENSE DAY 4: GOD'S HOLY SPIRIT

The last day of Intense started just as the Back Packers leaders said their ‘good bye’s’ and tidied up their stuff.

Jenny C got our session off to a flying start with an icebreaker about help. In teams, everybody had to carry a blind folded person around the campsite to pick up socks and return to the main stage area. Coz the Holy Spirit is a Helper huh. You like? Good little link huh?

The next game took things to a new level of surreal jocularity;
to illustrate that the Holy Spirit transforms us on the inside,
one person had to transform the outward appearance of the rest of their team with what ever they could find
+ some hair spray, face paints, kids sun glasses and other sundry items that just happened to be lying around.


















The transformations were staggering.

One team had lighting bolts on their faces (sadly this was accredit to Harry Potter and not David Bowie).
Another team had what appeared to be newspaper manes (like a lion might wear where it made of local free sheet ‘the Star’). One guy had a giant newspaper magnifying glass. Several boys sported bunches. And somebody had goggles around their ankle, stylish yet practical.
It was all either wonderfully diverse or horribly wrong, but I couldn’t figure out which.

It then fell to me to stand up and give a serious talk about the Holy Spirit whilst looking out at a crowd of freakishness. This was no easy task.

I spoke about how the Holy Spirit is the key to our understanding who we are as followers of Jesus Christ and living out our true identities in Him.

We had a brief look at who the Holy Spirit is and what he does. Then we went into our small groups to think about where we need the Holy Spirit’s help at the moment. I think this is an essential question for the last day of something like Intense or Back Packers. Weeks like this really raise your faith and encourage you and it’s easy to hit rock bottom again when you go back to your every day normal life. It’s hard living as a Christian every day, and God’s Holy Spirit is the one who can help us to do it.

Incidentally, if you have struggled with feeling deflated after an extreme Christian experience like Intense or a youth camp I really recommend a short book called Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud by Philip Yancey (ISN: 031021436X). It takes sense about how God can use those times of feeling distant from Him or let down, it only about £4 and it’s not that long either.

After the group times Ben Riley shared his story of how he had come to know God and how he made the decision to became a Christian (actually at a previous Intense, cool huh). It was great to hear what he had to say and he was the only speaker all week who got a round of applause!

At this point I got everybody to ask themselves an important question:
after everything they'd heard this week, did they believe that God loves them?

We encouraged those people who answered that question with a yes for the first time to make a decision to follow Jesus, and to say a prayer with the rest of us dedicationg ourselves to love and serve Jesus Christ.

As I stood on the stage praying and hearing people say 'amen' ("I agree") I got a sense of the significance of that moment.
It reminded me of two things that I hold true:
That when we worship God we are not starting something but joining in with the angels who do it all the time,
That every person who makes a decision of follow Jesus sparks a celebration in heaven.
There was a time when I thought that sort of thing was just sacarine sentimentality, but now I see them as in keeping with the character of the God I've been getting to know over the last 11 years.

I’m planning to post my notes and slides from the talk in the next couple of days so check back if you want to a look at those. If any other Intense speakers are up for having their notes posted here please email me.

I’ll blog about the bbq and sleep over some other time so check back for that too.

If you were part of Intense please sign up to blogger.com and leave your comments here. Or if you’ve been doing your own blog or similair please send me a link so I can post it here.

Cheerio

Ben

INTENSE DAY 3: BIBLE VERSES

Check them out for yourself:

Click here to read Hebrews 11:13-16

and click here to read Revalations 21:1-4

INTENSE DAY 3: CITIZEN OF HEAVEN

Years ago I went on a family holiday and we all fell out on the 3rd day. My aunty Gill told me that by the third day of anything people are tired and get on each others nerves. She said the SAS train their people to cope with the extra stress on the third day of an intensive mission. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s stayed in my head for about 15 years.

With this in mind we approached INTENSE DAY 3 head on.

We started the session with some ice breaker games to get people talking about their perfect Saturday, their perfect date, their perfect job, that sort of thing. You know, coz heaven is to be in the presence of God and that is perfection, nice easy link that.

Then we played a game of my own invention, which is best described as a marriage of crab football and tag with an injection of aggression. I call it:

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE.

Every body started with two ‘lives’ (2 stickers, one on each knee). They then adopted the position of the crab on their hands and knees. The object of the games was to rip stickers off other peoples knees and stick them to your own, whilst avoiding having your stickers ripped off. Once all your stickers are gone you are legally dead, and out of the game.
Everybody got stickered and crabbed up and hilarity (and some scenes of mild violence) ensued.

It was the ice breaker that split the critics;

“Could somebody tell me what that had to go with being a Citizen of Heaven?”
Sarah Shelly, the day’s speaker & Intense organiser

“I wish we had video taped that so we could show it to the churches and say ‘this is youth work’.”
Lizi Ingle, Free* Café & Intense organiser

Sarah Shelly gave a great talk on what it means to be a Citizen of Heaven. She used some striking photos to liken living as a Christian in the world to being in a departure lounge. She challenged us not to get too comfortable in this life as the Bible calls us ‘aliens’ and ‘strangers in a strange land’ because Heaven is our true home.

(Check out the next post to read the bible passages we looked at today.)

In small groups we talked about the practicalities of going about your every day life on Earth whilst being true to your identity as a Citizen of Heaven. In my group we talked about the times when it’s hardest to see yourself that way, particularly if you are the only Christian in your group of friends or your class.

We tried to come up with practical things that we could do to help us remember our true identity. Reading the Bible came top of the list, and meeting up with other Christians to support each other came pretty high too.

We finished up playing Cat & Mouse, a game which requires you to hold your arms out for a long time. Mine felt like they were coming off at the shoulders by the time we finished.

INTENSE DAY 2 - THE CHURCH / THE FAMILY OF GOD

Whilst the rain was coming down outside we started today’s Intense session with what I consider to be a true classic of the ‘ice breaker game’ world:
Chinese Charades.

If you’re not familiar, it’s like Chinese whispers, but instead of whispering a word you mime it. Hilarity ensues.
In today’s game one team started off miming ‘a stare out’. By the time this innocent little activity passed through the whole team it ended up looking like the crane kick out of 80’s classic movie The Karate Kid (watch the video to see what I’m on about).



What has this got to do with today’s subject, the Church / the family of God?
Well kids, good communication is very important in relationships.
The next game is a little harder to relate to our subject, but we had a darn good go.
In teams, everybody had to use their mouth’s to get jelly babies out of a pile of flour, then run over to a bowl and spit them in there. Wait, did I say bowl? I meant ‘church’. Acting as some kind of ‘mouth evangelists’ they had to bring people into the safety of the church.

Or something like that.

Ok, so it was an excuse to get everybody good and messy. And it worked.

Jenny Constantine gave the talk today about being part of God’s family. She introduced a lot of the people at Intense to an idea I first saw in the brilliant Screw Tape Letters by C.S. Lewis; that the Church isn’t just your local church or even all the churches in the world, but every person who ever was and ever will be a child of God. How about dem apples huh?!

It’s like God, being outside of time can view the whole Church in time and space, all at once.
It’s a nice ‘get your head round that’ idea. I like it!

We didn’t talk about cheese or moods in my small group today. But Phil did get his trumpet out and provided us with some encouraging ‘work harder’ music whilst we filled in some evaluation forms to help us reflect on what we had heard.

I’m a bit concerned that our groups corner of the carpet smells faintly of wee. We’re not sitting there tomorrow, no sir.

To end the session Andy led a big team game. I was hoovering up spilt flour by this point so I haven’t got a clue what it was about. It looked like it involved putting on a cape made of clear plastic. That’s got to be good….right?

INTENSE DAY 2 BIBLE STUFF

Today at Intense we'll be thinking about what part the Church plays in a Christian's identity.
We'll be looking at Ephesians Chapter 1 verses 9 to 10,
Chapter 2 verses 14 to 18
and
Chapter 4 verses 11 to 16.

Click em to read em!

(These links take you to Biblegateway.com. Click here to find out how to access other free online bible stuff, including audio books (great if you aren't much of a reader) and commentaries that help you get more out of the bible.)

INTENSE DAY 1

Day one started with a lot of slightly tired looking people in white t shirts standing around inside a big tent (or ‘the back packers main marquee’: you decide!).

We kicked things off in time honoured ‘yoof work stlyee’ with some ice breaker games to get everybody good an disorientated (or ‘to mix up social groups’: you decide!).
I tried out a game I’d read about online called

‘DON’T LOOK AT ME!’.

It sounded like fun to me.
The object of the Game is to stare at people with out them starring at you. If some one gives you eye contact your both out. It,er, didn’t really work that well. Things got better with the next game which was classic “swap places with somebody else who….” Stuff.

Most fascinating moment:
the number of people who like the taste of Calpol (the liquid pain killer…. for kids!).

Matt Ingle (the “popular and energetic” Emmanuel Church ley worker, for another couple of weeks at least) gave the talk on our daily subject, what it means to be a child of God. Have a look at yesterdays posting to read the bits from the bible that Matt spoke about.

After the talk we went into little group to chat about it. BIG SHOUT OUT to Phil who I’m leading a group with. We started our group time with my favourite question of the moment
(Slumby & Nish, if you’re reading this prepare to groan. 1, 2, 3, GROAN….):

“If your mood was a cheese what cheese would your mood be?”

From this all-important question we learned that Mini Babybel is the happiest of all cheeses. This is indisputably true.

To finish the session every body formed two lines and had use rolled up news papers to bash balloons at Sarah (‘Womans worker’ for Emmanuel) Shelly and Jenny (“I’m the Parish youth worker I am”) Constantine under the instruction of ‘the other’ Jenny. There were rules, points, even winners, but do these things really matter when you can wallop a balloon in the direction of a lady?

Check back for more of this kind of thing tomorrow.

WELCOME TO INTENSE 2007

Today is the first day of Intense 2007.


Intense is the young people element of Back Packers, the annual summer holiday club run by Churches Together for Chesham in the field at Thomas Harding School.


This year Intense is all about Christian Identity, a pretty important subject for anybody interested in Jesus Christ. What does happen to a person who becomes a Christian? Does anything happen at all?
Is it just a set of moral guidelines or another world view? That's what we will be looking at together this week.


Today Matt will be getting us to consider what it means to be a Child of God.


Clike here and here to read the bible verses we're going to look at together. Or click here and here to read them in context.

These links take you to Biblegateway.com to read the bible online. Click here to find out how to access other free online bible stuff, including audio books (great if you aren't much of a reader) and commentaries that help you get more out of the bible.

See you at Intense!

Are we dead or what?

No, not yet anyway.

Sorry for the lack of action here in the last 2 months and welcome to the summer holidays.
We are hoping to relaunch this blog in September so things will get quieter and then (hopefully) a lot louder.
Meanwhile, during the holidays Ben is going to blog about this and that, including Intense 2007, 2nd Chesham Boys Bridage Company Camp (try saying that with a mouth full of peanuts) and we'll try to keep the page up to date with details of the Youth Alpha activites we hope to run this summer.

In the mean time here are a couple of slices of wholesome youtube loveliness. Check out 'Dad' in the second clip, that man is an icon.

Is he strong? Listen bud, he's got radio active blood.

As a little 'Happy Half Term' present, here's the latest Free* Cafe' video:

This week is all about....

....this:


Get down to Youth Alpha at the earlier time of 7pm and stay till the daft time of midnight to watch the first 2 Pirates movies on Friday night.

Then there is the Youth Alpha trip to the cinema to see At Worlds End on Saturday. If you want to join us there are still tickets availible, but you will need to arrange your own transport to and from the cinema. Click here for contact details.

Have a great half term!

Benjamin

(Please click here for an important disclaimer about videos we link to, like the one above.)

Hello

Hey people, this is my 1st post ever -the crowd goes "ooooo"- and I won't lie to you, it has nothing to do with clubs or stuff or even about films, it's about Madeleine McCann and how you can show your support via MSN or forums or anything which may require a display picture. Just left click on the image below and click save it and then use the picture as a display picture. I wish Madeleine a safe return home.

Spiderman 3

Have you seen this natty trailer for Spiderman 3?



I went to see the film last Saturday, so here's a little review of sorts:

What's good about it:
The Sandman looks amazing and some of the action scenes are spectacular.

Funny?
It's the funniest Spiderman film yet. The chinned wonder Bruce Campbell is great in his obligatory scene, seemingly inspired by John Cleeves as a french waiter. Also Peter Parker does some pretty funny strutting down New York streets ( he totaly stole my moves).

What's wrong with it:
There are to many stories going on at once. The film makers rely on far to many coincidences to weave them all together. The end result is a film that feels 30 mins to long.
Peter Park gets emo hair whenever he is 'evil' which looks really silly.
Worst of all is the Jazz Club / dance scene. Oh dear oh dear.

That's interesting:
Most of the film is about forgiveness. We see how different characters react to people who have hurt them, and how destructive it is to hold on to bitterness. Only when Spiderman is able to reject his anger, reach out to his friends for help and forgive the people who hurt him is he able to win the fight.
Just like in Return of the Jedi, the battle is not won with violence but by the main characters over coming the enemy inside themselves. This is pretty interesting from a Christian point of view. Jesus won the ultimate battle with out throwing a single punch.
But also as a Christian I believe that I need God's Holy Spirit living in me to help me forgive and to totaly heal me of bitterness and hurt from the past. The film kinda suggests that all you need is a good attitude and help from your friends. Which is a shame coz that means lonely people are scuppered. Good job Jesus is inclusive!

Overall:
Not a great film. Very good in places but way to drawn out and over complicated.
I'll stick with Superman 3: it deals with the same themes, it's on TV every bank holiday and has the added benefit of being down right hilarious! What do you mean you haven't seen it?!!!!



(Please click here for an important disclaimer about videos we link to, like the one above.)

INTENSE 2007

Every July the churches in Chesham work together to run Back Packers, a great children's holiday club in the first week of the summer holidays.
Then.... when the little kiddy winks have all gone home,
a band of rascally youth workers start getting INTENSE:





These posters and flyers should start appearing in churches all over Chesham this weekend. You don't have to be a Christian or involved with a church to come along, just get intouch with us to request your registration form.

Click here for contact details.

Slim picking 'round 'ere huh!

Hello folks.
You may have noticed that this tasty blog page has been a little quiet since March.
In an aim to get more quality content on the page we've appointed Youth Alpha member Lauren to take over the page and keep things flowing. If your involved in any of the stuff we do for young people at the church and you would like to write stuff for the page, link videos or contribute in some other way then please get in touch.

Click here for contact details.

Questions questions, they fill my head!

This Friday night Youth Alpha is all about questions.
Questions about God, faith and the Bible mostly, but we'll take anything (so long as it's not rude).
So if you'd like to know what Sarah ate for breakfast, or what my parents were going to call me if I'd been born a girl, you know where to come!
Youth Alpha meets every Friday night in term time at Broadway Baptist Church in Chesham.
If you are aged between 11 and 16 and would liek to come along for the first time please get in touch with us so we knwo to expect you.
Click here for contact details.

(Please click here for an important disclaimer about videos we link to, like the one above.)

Mr Evil

I wasn’t invited to the cast party. It was evil! I’m cross.
Lauren

BEWARE OF THE ROBO CHICKENS!

Robo Easter Bunny says:


“Hey kids!
I hope you had a – click
very happy – click
and joyous – click
Easter Holiday – click- buzz – buzz – click.
And that you – click
found all the – click
robo eggs that I – click
hid in your garden – click
before they hatched into killer robo chickens and – click
ate your pets – click – buzz – buzz – click.
What do you – click
mean you thought they were – click
chocolate eggs and – click
ate them? – click – buzz- whrr
Now the robo chicks will catch in your stomach – click
and eat your internal organs – click.
See your GP immediately! – whrr

Ha – click – Ha – click.
I wouldn’t really – click
do that to you – click – children.
I – click – love you all.

click – Broadway Youth stuff is – click – starting back up this week!
Yeah – click – buzz – how about that huh – click – kids!!!!
Here – click – is how – click – this week looks
(buzz whrr buzz)

Wednesday F.B.I. 3.30pm to 5pm at Church
Thursday Solid Rock in the old Drama studio
at Chesham Park school, lunch time
Friday TGIF in H5 at Chesham High School, lunch time
Youth Alpha bowling trip
please get in touch with us to let us know if you want to come along.
Sunday Youth Alpha during the Church service 10.45 – 12pm
Review of the Old Testament – and that’s a lot of stuff to review!

Wednesday (next week) Free* Café’ 3.30 – 5pm at Church

Have a swell – click
week y’all – click – buzz – whrr!!!”

Click here for contact details.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Robo Easter Bunny is not a real rabbit.
Please stop feeding him dandy lion leaves and pieces of carrot.

HAPPY EASTER !!!!

Want to see something freaky?
Check out this American cartoon clip that tells the story of Easter day / Jesus’ resurrection.



I know what your thinking:
Did those radio active albinos really just use the dark side of the force to kill those soldiers?
Where did the choir come from? And why are they hiding off screen?
Did any of this really happen?

Click here to see for yourself.
Then click here and here to read some of my favourite bits from the bible.
I just LOVE how Jesus comes back from the dead and makes breakfast with his mates!

Have a great Easter everybody!

THIS WEEK....

Apologies for the lack of action on the page lately, it’s been a busy old week.
The high lights were the Stop the Traffik prayer sleep over last Saturday/Sunday and Mike Pilovatchi from Soul Survivor speaking at the church on Wednesday night. He talked about following God when life sucks.
You can order the CD for £2 from Broadway if you missed it, it’s well worth it!

This week:
Friday night – NO YOUTH ALPHA!
In a change to the advertised stuff youth alpha is not on tonight. Sorry about that folks. There are a lot of people away for the Easter holidays & we felt it best to cancel.

Sunday morning – YOUTH ALPHA IS ON!
Sarah & Wendy will be hosting the last session of the term & finishing up our work together on the Old Testament. Should be a good one so make it a priority.

Everything will be back after the holidays, Free* Café is back on the 18th April, YA Friday is back on the 20th and YA Sunday is back on the 22nd.

This Week....

We’re going ‘Stop the Traffic’ crazy this week
At tomorrow’s Free* Café’ at Broadway Baptist Church we’ll be playing this video:



And asking people to sign the Stop the Traffic declaration.
You can click here to sign it yourself.
Or click here to read about the chocolate campaign

(Free* Café is for anyone in school years 6 to 11 and is open from 3.30pm to 5pm)

On Thursday lunch time Solid Rock meets at Chesham Park school in the old Drama studio. After chatting about Mario last time this week it’s Kermit the Frog’s turn.



On Friday lunch time there’s TGIF in H5 at Chesham High school (this week presented by little me ☺ )
Youth Alpha is on as always from 7.30 – 9.30pm here at good ol’ Broadway Baptist Church. In a change to the advertised program we’ll be thinking a bit more about prophets tonight.

On Saturday there’s the Children’s Easter Craft Morning at Broadway. It runs from 10.30 – 12.30pm, contact our office for details (click here for our contact details).

Then Saturday evening is the BIG ONE,
the Stop the Traffik prayer sleep over at the King’s Church in Amersham.
The event runs from 8pm to 9am, there’ll be games, DVD’s, a whole bunch of fun and a lot of prayer, so don’t miss it
(for school years 7 – 13).