Where Am I?

Even though I'm not sure if I actually have any readers left due to lack of writing, I would like to inform people I am still alive, but that things are a foot and hopefully I will reveal more soon! I would put up a better design, but my Mac seems to have finally past away, meaning I am without design tools at this minute. All will be revealed soon, promise, until then!

What's happened to Jon Jolly?

Reports are unclear but it would seem since his wife getting pregger's Jon has dissapeared from the online world. His blog remains silent, his facebook inactive apart from a status update about nothing....has the Jolly finally run out of words? Possibly.

Did I not really have anything to blog about....possibly....
Am I blogging when I should be working....likely....

If you have any information on the whereabouts of Mr Jolly then please inform the police...they'll probably think your making the name up...and laugh.

More soon...

PS. A redesign is in the pipeline...this design is temp.

Update and an Apology

Well it's been a little while since writing, so this post I'm afraid differs from the aim of the blog, so I apologise for both it being different to norm, and for the lateness of it!

For anyone who doesn't know, I've now finished uni, averaged a 2.2, which isn't the best, isn't the worst, and is probably typical of my attitude towards the whole thing.

Since then I've been working and Furious Records doing Data entry, although the last few days I've been ill so unable to work. I've also now moved to Selsey to live with a family who have offered me free Board and rent, which is amazing in it self, plus I get my clothes ironed!

In August we're taking the youth away to "Newday", a Soul Survivor style camp for the youth in the New Frontiers network, and we're really excited about that as we currently have around 30 kids booked in, although we're believing for more.
After that I go on holiday for a couple of weeks, then in September I come back and start working for the Church in Chichester (Grace Church) doing a gap year called "Impact" which I'm really excited about!

Speaking of Youth, we've had some really exciting events, we did a 24 hour "around the table" table tennis tournament, nicknamed Donkeyathon, although technically it wasn't donkey that we were playing, but shhh. Through doing that we raised 1500 pound to buy provisions for the youth for newday, including a new marquee!

On top of that on Sunday mornings we've invited the spirit into the youth session (when the adult's talk is happening) and seen it manifest with different young people being touched in different ways, although never at the sacrifice of Bible teaching. Such comments have appeared since that as "Wow, I'll never be the same" as the young people have been totally blown away by it. We had 5 people become Christians the the other week, and on a social recently, where we turned the Church building into a massive youth hall, with 3 games consoles set up, including duel dance mats and a wii, table football and table tennis and smoothies, we hit 47 young people, beating are average of 25.

Tonight we're going to the beech and have 48 booked in, extremely exciting stuff, and as a result some are starting to gradually filter in on a Sunday morning as well.

It's all incredibly exciting and I ask your prayers for this time for both my future, but particularly the youths!

Blessings,

Rich

I'm not ashamed of the gospel...apart from in church

In youth group the other day we had a boys night which we do once a month. At the same time the girls do a girls night. Both groups watched different dvd's with the purpose of creating discussion, to which both did. The girls watched "Heart of Soul Surfer" the story of a Christian female surfer called Bethany Hamilton who was attacked by a shark resulting in her losing an arm. From what I hear the Dvd was a fantastic discussion starter, although perhaps boys would have been a bit distracted by girls constantly walking around in bikinis. For the guys, we watched a documentary on Hillsong United and how they started, found in the "united we stand" cd+dvd combo from a few years back.

The guys found this particularly inspirational as they realised that this amazing ministry they were witnessing started with only a few, was not always the "cool, hip, trendy" thing perhaps we are use to seeing today, and for many of them it was a realisation that the event was not the only place they could engage with God, but also within youth, and within church.

This led to some fantastic discussions about going deeper with God in both youth and church, but what was interesting was that for many of them, it was church that was the problem in terms of engaging with God. Many felt embarrassed knowing their parents were there, or that people might comment, or even in some cases embarrassed to worship.

One commented that what happens if another family comes in, and their son isn't truly Christian, what would they think, and if they were part of the school, would they reveal something to everyone at school.

This seemed to be a real fear. Obviously, as Christians school is a challenge in it self, but surely church should be a safe haven for these individauls?

Another point that came out from the dvd was the realisation that the youth could be the missionaries into school. So often we can spend all our time as youth workers attempting to get into schools to do assemblies, run groups, etc, which is all fantastic, but the reality is the best evangelist are the youth themselves.

A friend of mine once said that people to not come to Christ through being yelled at, but rather through love and friendship, and I hold that value true.

The questions then are these:
How do we best equip are youth?
How do we get them unashamed in church?

Blessings,

Rich

The aim!

A few months ago I mentioned I was looking to focus my blog more. My aim now is to avoid articles on my own self motivation, and instead discuss my youth worker experiences, and hopefully share my knowledge within the online community, a trade if you will, since I'm aware that there is much I need to learn.

In this vein, you will see over the coming weeks highlights of youth ministry, interesting experiences that have happened, and also bringing to the table difficult questions that are raised. I will also outline how our church runs the youth, and the overall aim.

For now I will leave you with this:

Recently I ran a feedback session for the youth at the end of term. The aim was simple, I would ask questions, they would answer, and someone would write down. One of the question was on the worship of the church and how they felt about it, and what they thought would engage them more. Many of them gave responses, often quite negative.
Blessings,

Rich

Breaking the Event mentality

I write this post in two minds. I have just returned from helping at the 11-14’s venue of Spring Harvest, aka, Distinctive. It was a fantastic time, watching 450 young people worshipping God passionately declaring their love for him through song and prayer. It brought me on more then one occasion to a place of tears. It was awe inspiring, yet something was wrong with this picture.

The thing that was wrong was simple: for many of these young people, this was their spiritual top up for the year. It was a one-time thing. For some of them they’ll go home, be on a high for a week, then have a set back, and suddenly they’ve forgotten that high. They’ve forgotten that moment of excitement. That moment where they looked to the Father, lost in His glory, His wonder, His awesome nature. Where they stand united as one, denomination not mattering, just acknowledging the presence of a King.

For us as youth workers, the question is this: How do we keep our young people away from an event mentality to a realisation of God in everyday living.

Much of this, I believe, comes down to how we run our youth ministries. To finding the balance between having a laugh and being crazy to drawing into a place of intimacy with God. Phil Dooley of Hillsong United (The Hillsong joint aged youth group) say in the early days the mission was simple, Youth had to be fun! On the other end of the scale though, they still had regular talks every week, and gave the youth guys a chance to play one or two worship songs to lead the response. And they grew, and praise became a major focus of their youth.

What we need to be careful of in this is that we don’t go overboard with the fun and dumb down God for the youth. They need to be routed in solid Bible teaching, to know what they believe, where they stand on issues, and in this they need to be given the chance to come to their own conclusion on things, and not just be told “this is what we believe” but to accept that truth for themselves.

Young people also need to experience God outside of the event. Many of them struggle with worshipping in front of their parents, or even their peers in church, feeling that they are the odd one out. We need to encourage this uniqueness and willingness when it surfaces. Church for some of these young people is boring, so again, we need as youth workers to engage them on the Sunday morning.

When I was in Texas a few years ago, I helped out at a Kids/youth camp. We had meetings every night lasting often up to 4 hours. These weren’t filled with games, and fun activities as such, it was just praise and worship, followed by a 45 minute talk, and the young people listened. They engaged, they responded, they wanted more! I saw 7 year olds, worshipping God, hands in the air loving their God.

There are churches in Columbia, where kids are the ones leading it. We need to make sure we’re not dumbing it down and realise there is something deeper for them, even those on the fringes.

Much of this is making sure ourselves and our youth teams are in a place of worship as well, yet being able to engage the young people during the worship times, encourage them to reach for the blessings of God, and understand that he is as much there as in Spring Harvest/Soul Survivor/Newday etc.

At the same time, as a youth team we need to exit this mentality of the Event. Ourselves, we need to be in a place where everyday is walking with Jesus. Where we can be hanging with a group of friends, and go from having fun together, to praying for healing, to prophesying for each other, to taking a bigger step into his kingdom.

This has to be the first place we start, ourselves. What our are expectations of events, are we waiting for them to change and challenge our young people? Or are we believe God to do that in them whatever? Even on our residentials with just our own youth, we can all come back thinking “that was great, when’s the next one”, and maybe even with events the same can happen. What we need is a mentality of God is with us everyday.

I liked Dinosaurs, he liked spaceships

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, thought like a child and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I did away with childish things"
1 Corinthians 13:11

When I was young I was obsessed with Dinosaurs. I remember Jurassic Park coming out and being in awe of it as I finally got to see my fantasies in real life (Obviously I'm talking about seeing the dinosaurs come to life, and not so much the lawyer being eaten on the toilet)
My brother also liked dinosaurs, but no where near as much. Whilst I had book after book looking at the subject, and videos and activity dig sets which were all incredible, he was only mildly interested.

His big thing was space. And again, I liked space, I thought it was pretty cool. It goes on forever and is vast beyond imagination, what's not to like about it?
But he really liked it, even to the point of having his own spaceman costume, helmet included. He had books, he had pictures, anything to do with space and getting there, including many models of airplanes, he loved the idea of travelling into the sky and beyond to space.

We had very different mindsets. I loved the past, I loved investigating these creatures that had never been see, whilst he gaze to the future. The greatest part was though that we were able to cross over in our interests.

***

In some people's eyes, they look at me and still see a little boy. In fact I look at me and still see a little me. I remember reaching 16 and thinking "When I'm 18, I'll be sorted, life will be great, I'll know where I'm going, I'll know what I'm doing, it will be fantastic." Needless to say I'm now 23 and still no knowing where I'm going in many ways. The difference is now that I am comfortable with that because God's got it in hand. I was comfortable with it once before, until I reached 14/15 and I was told I needed a plan, I needed some direction.

I love how in the scriptures it talks about coming back to that child like innocence. It's like God looks at all are worries, all are concerns and says "why worry? Be a child again, enjoy being with me." And what I love is that God shaped us from day one.
He made us unique, individual, even twins are different!

My brother and I, we often got compared, and sometimes I didn't like it. We look similar in many ways, we have similar voices, we talk with similar mannerisms and have similar interests. The difference is now, I know we are called to different things, and that we each have our own part to play. Even as a child we were completely different for all our similarities. I liked dinosaurs, he liked spacemen.

***

These days my brother is into sound. He works as a sound engineer in the north of England (we're still praying into that one) and is heavily involved with the set up teams and the running of the tech-department. It's been an honour over the years to have the chance to be invited up to his church and run the visual side of things for gigs they've put on. It's been a fantastic time. Now my main focus though is youth ministry, it's an incredibly important part of my life and I would never want to give it up unless God called me to. I still am involved in some tech stuff. He is still involved in youth stuff. We're both unique, God called individauls to our own ministries. What excites me is knowing they cross over. I liked dinosaurs, he liked spacemen.