Summer Sanctuary
A few weeks ago, our teenagers went away for their annual retreat. “Summer Sanctuary”. Jo Phillips, our Families Co-ordinator shares all that went on:
“Summer Sanctuary - what a weekend it was! From the 30th July- 1st August, 50 teenagers went away for the weekend at Oakwood Climbing Centre in Wokingham and it was a JAM packed weekend full of friendship, fun, worship, activities, food, preaches, seminars, night games, bonfires, the all-time classic slip n slide rounders and, of course, very little sleep!!
We started off Friday night with a bonfire and it was such a joy to see young people connecting with one another and enjoying everybody’s presence! Around the campfire we all sang out ‘How Great is our God’ and it was a great way to start the weekend focussing our attention back onto God!
Straight after the campfire, we began our night games in which had everyone running around playing zombies (imagine 50 teenagers playing hide and seek in the dark whilst making zombie noises…that is basically the game!) and again it was just such a joy to see young people having fun and enjoying being able to physically meet.
On Saturday morning and evening we had our sessions where we had worship, a preach and ministry time. A highlight from these sessions has to be the fact we were able to sing in worship again and seeing young people engage in sung worship and responding to the preaches and seeing salvations gave a huge sense of hope in passing the batten of faith onto the next generation!
Oakwood Climbing Centre has a variety of different activities that we were able to partake in. Saturday afternoon was full of climbing, crate stacking, archery, and high ropes (WHICH ARE A LOT HIGHER AND SCARIER ONCE YOU ARE UP THERE!). During the activities, we were in groups combined of young people across Bracknell, Farnborough and Windsor. Throughout the weekend, it never once felt like three separate youth ministries - the unity and friendship between all the young people across the sites was one of the highlights from the weekend too.
As the weekend was so JAM packed another highlight of the weekend was being able to eat together again! 50 young people coming together to eat was very loud but, let’s be honest, a weekend away that isn’t loud isn’t a weekend away!! Mark and Jo Bristow very kindly gave up their weekend to cook all our food and serve us and they were such a blessing to us- so thank you! During one lunchtime we had music playing and when ‘How Great is Our God’ came on we had young people singing along so loudly and what a joy it was to see young people enjoying church!
We ended Summer Sanctuary by playing the all time classic Slip N Slide rounders! Imagine playing a normal game of rounders but now add a slippery sheet of tarpaulin mixed with A LOT of water and 30 bottles of washing up liquid! (YES I mean 30!) It’s fair to say I think Slip N Slide rounders mixed with 600 water balloons was a definite highlight for a lot of young people that weekend as being able to be crazy loud, get leaders with water balloons and be really competitive is something you would really enjoy after not being able to meet physically for so long!
As the weekend came to an end a common reflection the team had is that it felt like we did 6 months worth of youth ministry in such a short amount of time and now we look forward to when we can do youth ministry physically once again!
