A Peach of a Friday Evening
Last Friday night must have been one of the noisiest events we've held in The Kerith Centre with our biggest ever Battle of the Bands. There were seven local youth bands plus our very own Ethos and some friends of Lee who have a band called Miami which plays the London club scene (Ethos and Miami were excluded from the competition). Judges included Linda Serck who works for Radio Berkshire finding new musical talent and Sam Tattersall and Matt Salvage (who those of you who have been around for a while may remember from when they were part of the church) from local band OK Tokyo.
All in all it seemed to me like a breakthrough as we seek to be more peach like. We reckon there were between 250 and 300 young people there which was brilliant - even if we do need to look at how we better control the moshing next time! The standard of the bands was quite incredible, especially given how young some of the were. Our technical crew running the PA, lights and the live video mixing did an amazing job and the stewards did well to make sure we still had a building at the end of it all!
But most of all we really managed to engage with the young people of Bracknell in a setting which was relevant to them. I'm not going to pretend that anyone was saved or that we directly preached the gospel, but there are now a whole load of young people who will have gone back to school today talking about this great event they went to at The Kerith Centre on Friday night, who will relate to Lee and our team, and the team from the Warfield's Eternity Youth Church who we ran the event in partnership with, in a different way, and who will have had their preconceptions of Christians and the things they get up to challenged. That's not to mention the impact the on the parents who turned up to watch their children play and even on Linda from Radio Berkshire who admitted her expectations were very very low when she was asked to judge a church based music event - she left very, very impressed by what she'd seen. The three winning bands will be playing at Hope in the Park on the 30th August so hopefully lots of the young people will turn up there too. Listen out for a cracking rendition of "Sweet Child of Mine" from one of the winning bands - here's a link to the highly inferior Guns N Roses version to whet your appetite.
Hopefully we'll get some photo's of the event up on an online album soon so if you weren't there you can get a feel for what went on - when we do I'll post a link to it.
Hope you're having a great week.
Simon.
All in all it seemed to me like a breakthrough as we seek to be more peach like. We reckon there were between 250 and 300 young people there which was brilliant - even if we do need to look at how we better control the moshing next time! The standard of the bands was quite incredible, especially given how young some of the were. Our technical crew running the PA, lights and the live video mixing did an amazing job and the stewards did well to make sure we still had a building at the end of it all!
But most of all we really managed to engage with the young people of Bracknell in a setting which was relevant to them. I'm not going to pretend that anyone was saved or that we directly preached the gospel, but there are now a whole load of young people who will have gone back to school today talking about this great event they went to at The Kerith Centre on Friday night, who will relate to Lee and our team, and the team from the Warfield's Eternity Youth Church who we ran the event in partnership with, in a different way, and who will have had their preconceptions of Christians and the things they get up to challenged. That's not to mention the impact the on the parents who turned up to watch their children play and even on Linda from Radio Berkshire who admitted her expectations were very very low when she was asked to judge a church based music event - she left very, very impressed by what she'd seen. The three winning bands will be playing at Hope in the Park on the 30th August so hopefully lots of the young people will turn up there too. Listen out for a cracking rendition of "Sweet Child of Mine" from one of the winning bands - here's a link to the highly inferior Guns N Roses version to whet your appetite.
Hopefully we'll get some photo's of the event up on an online album soon so if you weren't there you can get a feel for what went on - when we do I'll post a link to it.
Hope you're having a great week.
Simon.