Youth at King's
The summer series of guest blogs continues today with a post from Tex Chettiar, who joined our team last year as a Pastor on the Catford site and oversees our youth ministry.
Many of you will know that part of my role at Kings, in addition to being a pastor at Catford, is to oversee the youth work across the church. I have just come to the end of my first full academic year of being involved with young people, and it has been an exciting journey with some great moments - as well as some challenges, as you’d expect!! Here are some highlights of how we’ve seen God at work in the lives of young people across the church this year:
- At our week of prayer in January, we had a group of young lads attend every night!
- In June we baptised 5 young people at Catford.
- A group of young people from Lee started a daily Bible study on their own which naturally led them to ask more questions about faith. This inspired the Lee team to include a youth table at Alpha. A constant 13 people attended each week and we eventually had to expand to two tables for the youth!
- We have seen new young people attend Friday Night Youth across both sites (Lee & Catford).
- We have seen the Youth Band start serving and being involved with leading worship at various sites on a Sunday.
- At Catford we have had a large number of young people express their desire to serve and have seen them join teams.
Over the last year we’ve been able to see an increase in engagement of young people, not only on a Friday night but across other areas within church life. We are grateful to God for all He has done and is continuing to do in our young people.
Newday
We will be ending the academic year by taking the young people to Newday. For those who haven’t heard about Newday before, it is a festival that gathers around 8000 young people over five days for worship, teaching and loads of fun. This year we are taking 130 young people and 45 team from King’s, who will help lead the young people and feed us.
As a church we are also heavily involved with the running of Newday. We have a band from King’s that will be leading worship over the week, Andrew Wilson and Joe Macnamara will be preaching, I will be leading a seminar stream for youth leaders, Neal Glanville will be playing a big part in leading the logistics and maintenance team, and there are many others involved in various areas.
We would love you to join us in praying over the week for the following:
- Praying for good weather!
- Pray that young people would powerfully meet with God.
- Pray that there would be a sense of family on the King’s site.
- Pray for the team who are leading, preaching and serving.
- Pray that we would see young people come to faith.
We are full of faith for the week ahead and look forward to returning from Newday with many stories of how God has met with our young people.
