The best thing on the internet this week:

Now that Star Wars is a 'saga' and Indiana Jones is set to appear for the 4th time, that must make Back to the Future the best movie trilogy of all time.



Here's a video I saw this week of Biff from BTTF singing about questions,
or as I like to call it:
THE BEST THING ON THE INTERNET THIS WEEK!

This week....

Been a bit lax on the 'this week' front lately, so here goes:

Wednesday there's F.B.I. (those in the know...know), 3.30pm - 5pm
@ Broadway Baptist Church, Le' Chesh

Thursday, Chesham Park school at Solid Rock
I'll be looking at Mario. Specifically at what the Bible might have to say to the world's most famous plumber and platform hopper. If he was real, and not made of colour pixels.
Solid Rock meet in the old drama studio at lunch time.

On Friday there's TGIF in Chesham High school, room H5 at lunch time.

Then in the evening we'll be thinking about suffering at Youth Alpha. Not suffering at Youth Alpha you understand, more, er, you know, talking about suffering whilst we are at Youth Alpha, well not 'whilst we are at Youth Alpha'. Er. You get the idea, right?

Youth Alpha is 7.30 - 9.30pm at Broadway Baptist Church, Chesham, Bucks.
The last two weeks have been pretty heavy going so this Friday we're aiming to make plenty of time to chat and have a laugh.

Then Youth Alpha is back on Sunday morning during the church service, 10.30 - 12pm. This week we're looking at the prophets.

Enjoy!

Tonight

Youth Alpha tonight is all about sex.
Yep, really.

Well, sexuality anyway.
We’re going to be discussing what we think is God’s best for our sex lives and looking at the bible for some guidance. It’s going to be interesting.

For school year 7 - 11 @ Broadway Baptist Church, Chesham. 7.30pm - 9.30pm.
Call us if it's your first visit so we know to expect you. Click here for our contact details, address and stuff.

Youth Alpha this Friday

When I was at school the entire cast of Grange Hill sang a special song about saying "No" to drugs. It had a little rap bit in it and everything.

In 2007 you've got an entire Youth Alpha session to talk about Drugs and Alcohol.... now that's progress!

They'll also be the usual mix of games and fun stuff.
Usual time, 7.30pm - 9.30pm at Broadway Baptist Church in Chesham, Bucks, (UK)

Click here for a link to a very well put together page that looks at what the Bible says about drug use. It's well worth a look as it's more intelligent then "Just say No".

There's no Youth Alpha on Sunday morning but we do have an All Age Service at Broadway. See you there!

Let's write a letter everyone!

This lady is Rachel Corrie, she was an American peace protestor.



She was killed in 2003 when a military digger ran her over during a protest against the Israeli army demolishing Palastinian homes.
I know what you're thinking “Palastine/Israel, it’s to complicated.”
Either that, or you've picked a side and your sticking with it.
But check this out:


The Church of England made money out of the machines that killed Rachel Corrie and destroyed people's homes.


I’m not trying to hype this up or play with your emotions here. Rachel’s story puts a human face to a big issue.
The machine in question is a military digger made by Caterpillar Inc (same brand as the boots and t-shirts). Part of their business makes and sells military vehicles and the UK Anglican church have £2.2million invested in the company.

The bottomline: UK churches make money out of weapons of oppression.
Anybody got a Bible verse to back that up?



Please make up your own mind on this issue. But add this to your consideration:
The Christian community in Israel told the UK church that Caterpillar's profitting from what is going on in their neighbourhood is a bad thing.
There are plenty of people in the UK Anglican church who agree so last year the General Synod (Anglican leaders) recommended that the church disinvest in the company and that they should be more fussy about where they put their money in future.
Thing is……. that was 12 months ago
and there’s no news of anything happening since. click here to read what the CAAT Chrsitian Network have to say about the issue and what they have been doing about it. Or Google Caterpillar Anglican Synod and find out for yourself.

We hear a lot of bad news stories from all over the world and it's easy to feel powerless to do anything about them. But this one is do-able. The Anglican church CAN make sure they don't profit from violence and oppression, in the middle east or anywhere in the world.
But they might need a bit of encouragment and a few reminders.

YOU can do something.
Here’s the address for the Archbishop of Canterbury (the boss of the Anglican church). Write to him and let him know how you feel about this.

The Archbishop of Canterbury
Lambeth Palace,
London
SE1 7JU

FLAMIN’ STROOF!

Last night was a whopper at Broadway Baptist Church.
Elaine Storkey, president of Tear Fund gave the first presentation in the Lent Lectures series. The series is put on By Churches Together for Chesham, a big group of lots of churches, in Chesham. The clue is in the name people!



The evening was really something. It was probably the most well argued, convincing and disturbing presentation I’ve seen. Forget that Inconvient Truth movie!
Elaine spoke about a lot of things including climate change, fair trade, arms dealing, third world debt and how they are all connected. It’s hard to sum up all that she said, but here’s the best I can do:

“ If you live in the UK,
buy things in shops and ride in a car or plane ever - CONGRATULATIONS!
You are making an active contribution to global poverty.
So unless you truly believe that your life is worth the same as 10 poor people's
WAKE UP AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.”

Like I said, it was disturbing.



Here's my top 3 biggest shocks – I like to think of this as the “Wake up and smell the coffee list”:

1. Elaine said she had been on a trip to Congo. There’s been a war there, torture, rape, boy soldiers, hell-on-earth-type stuff. She was at a meeting with representatives from 50 Christian denominations (Catholics, Anglicans , etc) and they wanted to know why their ‘brothers and sisters’ in the UK church had forgotten about them. One of the group had been to the UK recently to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and had watched our TV news with interest. He wanted to know why all the news stories were about Iraq and the Beckhams.

OK, so in the UK we’re really into this one war and celebrity trivia, but why is the UK Church no different? Why are we preoccupied with those things too?

2. At the same meeting a rep’ said “Congo isn’t a poor nation, we have a lot of natural mineral resources. One thing we don’t have, and you won’t find anywhere in Africa, is munitions factories (places to make guns, bombs and bullets). Why does your country sell weapons to our tortures?”.

I’m stuffed if I know a morally upright answer to that. Do you?

3. Poor people in the UK are more likely to be malnourished then poor people in many developing nations.



Here’s what I want YOU to do with this information:

Pick something that you think is wrong, e.g. climate change.

You’re on the internet right now, so go to Google.

Type in a few key words and “Christians against” (e.g. Christians against Climate Change).

Check out some of the web sites. Find an organisation that sounds good to you then get involved with it.

Email our local MP.
Sign online petitions on Tony Blair’s very own web page.
Write a letter to Nike saying “Your trainers are officially uncool until you start paying a fair wage to the people who make them. So don’t expect to sell anything to me or any of my friends until then”.
Write to Tesco and say “I’d rather food cost a bit more and you valued farmers as much as you value me as a customer. Sort it out!”.

Or come up with your own ideas – but do something today.

(check out the next post for a very specific suggestion)

Jango is back!

Here he is folks, little geordie Jango has returned for his second appearance on our youtube channel.



This video is the latest one in the series that Ming and I have been doing for Free* Cafe, looking at God's top ten rules for living ( or 'the ten commandments' if you like).

Free* Cafe'

It's back again tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday 21st Feb), 3.30 - 5pm at Broadway Baptist Church, La Chesh'.
They'll be all the usual hi-jinkery, including a new video and another wii nunchuk so we can get some two player boxing going. If you live in or around Chesham and you're in school year 6 to 11 you'd be daft to miss it.
click here to find out more!

Chesham Snow Day!

Hey, remember those snow days two weeks ago? No?
Here to refresh your memory is the latest
installment from Broadway Youth TV,
our snazzy little youtube channel.




It has a natty sound track huh.

SNOW DAY!

Pretty much all the schools are closed and the roads are in choas.,... cool huh.

Paper cuts are the worst kind of pain

Here's the best thing I've seen on youtube today, it's worth a minute of your time I promise.

There's a very good reason to come to Free* cafe' this week

Free* Cafe'

Chesham High rocks!

TGIF at Chesham High school are hosting two days with a band called My Spoon.
Click here to visit their web site or here to see their myspace profile and listen to some of their music.
Or you can watch this cheeky little fan made photo montage from youtube.



My Spoon will be playing in assemblies on Wednesday and Thursday and doing lunch time events both days too, including a question session.

Well done to all the TGIF guys who worked hard today on the quiz / chocolate fondue event for the lower school and the fund raiser event in the hall.

Click here to see an important note about using videos we link to or embed.

Last weekend

Friday nights Youth Alpha was a movie and pizza night. Every body brought DVD's along and following an extremely democratic process we picked Click and stuck it up on the big screen in the church.






I thought it would just be a lot of silly jokes (and there were plenty of those), so imagine my surprise when the 'death' scene had several of us welling up (and in one case a bit more then that, you know who you are! :-)

On Sunday morning we decided that the 'flap' clip was the best bit, so here it is in all it's glory:



BUT DID YOU NOTICE....
.... Continuity: When Michael got the kids new bikes the green box for Donna is seen behind Michael on a small table without a bow. In the next shot when Michael is giving the box to Donna it has a bow.
Well did you? Huh? Huh? You did? Oh. I didn't.
Click here for a list of continuity errors.

Thanks to everybody who brought pizza or anything else. Although there was no offical competition I think Sarah won the pizza eating contest. But don't tell her I said so ah!

Sunday morning's Youth Alpha was an interesting one. We watched some adverts and talked about how they try to influence us. We talked about how we are influenced by peopel around us and what influence we have on them and we looked at what was going on with God's people in Israel in about 1050 BC.

We looked at the bible book 1 Samuel, here's a dodgy artist's impression of Samuel himself:




How ever did he get his beard so pointy? He's got to be using products!

Anyway, the people of Israel wanted a king. They had some good reasons for wanting one, but the real reason was they wanted to be like everybody else. God had told his people to be different and to stand out. So what they were really doing was rejecting Him as their leader so they could follow the crowd. The amazing thing about this is that it's your story and my story; it's still happening everyday. We get that moment where we say "everybody else has got one", whether it's something like this, something like this, or something like this.

God gave the people a king, and it was no surprise that the first one they got (Saul) made a lot of mistakes because he cared to much about how he looked infront of other people. We also looked at how God made rules for a king about 200 years before Israel ever fancied getting one, and we thought about how these rules can help us focus on living the new life that God has given us in Jesus.

As a little parting shot, here's one of the adverts we watched. It left me abit confused, who is going to make dinner and clean the bathroom whilst the rest of us are dancing and making wish lists?



Click here to see an important note about using videos we link to or embed.

Pizza and DVD night!

Don't forget - Friday night is Pizza & DVD night at Youth Alpha.
Bring along a DVD of your choice & something to eat (prefferably pizza) at the usual time of 7.30pm.
Pick up time is at 10pm ( a bit later this week to make sure we have time to watch all of the film).

Venue is the usual:Broadway Baptist Church, Le Chesh.

Youth Alpha Rules

On Sunday morning at Youth Alpha we came up with a list of rules that we all felt we could agree to. Copies will be given out to everybody who is part of the group and all parents.

Here they are so that we can quickly link back to them when we need to:








At Youth Alpha we

1. Respect each other

2. Concentrate during group activities

3. Avoid Tangents

4. Do what the leaders ask us to do

5. Act in a responsible and mature way

Youth Alpha is a:

Swearing free zone

Bully free zone



And here's why each rule is important to us:

1. Because we all want to be respected and we all want to be listened to when we have something important to say.
2. We recognise that we will ‘get out’ as much as we are prepared to ‘put in’ to group activities.
3. We all go off on one sometimes, but we know that the whole group benefits when we stay focused.
4. The leaders are responsible for our safety. Following instructions is the best way for everyone to have
fun in a safe environment.
5. We all want to enjoy ourselves. Behaving responsibly is the best way to ensure the whole group will have fun.

A swearing free zone:
because God made our tongues for better things then that.

A bully free zone:
because the Bible tells us to treat each other with love.

Stop Motion Fun!

Check out these uber geeks who made stop motion videos of arcade classics.



This one gets a bit dull half way through, but it's well worth a look:



Click here to see an important note about using videos we link to or embed.

This week....

Here's what's up with Broadway Youth this week (or "stuff for young people at Broadway Baptist church in Chesham for those not in the know).

F.B.I. Wednesday 3.30 - 5pm - that's right, no Free* Cafe' this week (yeah I know, not our normal routine but we've had to change it this month, sorry)

Solid Rock, Thursday lunch time in the Old Drama studio at Chesham Park school
A great place to spend your lunch time, have a laugh and look at what the bible says.

TGIF, Friday lunch time in room H5 at Chesham Park school

Youth Alpha, Friday 7.30 - 10pm, for school years 7 to 11.
Bring a DVD and some pizza, so we can , errr, vote on which one to watch and cook up and eat the other one.
That's right, we're spending the evening starring at frozen food and chewing on shiny silver discs!
Hmmm, was that to obvious?

Youth Alpha, Sunday 10.30 - 12pm (during the morning service)
This week we're looking at how God chooses a leader, from one of my favourite bible books: 1 Samuel.

All events are at Broadway Baptist Church unless otherwise stated.

Darth Vader was a DJ

The best thing on youtube right now:


Click here to see an important note about using videos we link to or embed.

Did you get caught in the storm yesterday?

Stroof but it was windy yestersay!
Just in Chesham one of the schools has a power outage and is closed today and another one had a roof blow off one of the building. Walking to work this morning I came across loads of fallen branches and busted up fences, it's a bit scarry to see the town looking so beaten up.
At our house the outside cupboard door blew off it's hinges,
which was admittidly less dramatic then these pictures half inched off the BBC news website:






Don't forget:

Youth Alpha is on tonight,
7.30 - 9.30pm
at Broadway Baptist Church

And the Novimost Bosnia night
on Sunday, 6.30 - 9.30 at Broadway.
It sounds like a lot of fun so get your team together
(scroll downto the 'This Week' post for details of this).