ok... finally some feedback of my life

Wow… the last couple of weeks have really been busy. So I’ll have to divide this into different parts. In fact I don’t want to bore you guys with 2 many details so I will try do it in point form. Yeah right... ok… I’ll try keep it brief at least.

I am now leading our youth leadership team here in Springs. (That kind of makes me youth pastor except that I’m not in it full time). My strategy for this really is going to be spending 80% of my time with 20% of the people. I.e. the existing leadership team. Started out by revisiting our vision statement and looking at its implication and where we are falling short of fulfilling the vision.

Decided that we need to establish some foundational things (as I couldn’t recall us having preached the gospel to any of the youth the whole year).

So I preached a hard core message on how you become a Christian and made sure I dispelled the “I’m Christian by osmosis” idea. I used props and my own testimony to get it across with the help of an advanced form of the bridge diagram from contagious Christianity. So the youth are now officially clear on how Christianity works. I did not water down anything.

Then we finished preparing for the boiler room that was launched for the transformations event. I was hoping for 20 kids… was horrified when 80 arrived… we didn’t have enough space so ended up using not just the block of offices that was assigned to us but the actual stadium. 80 kids spending the night in creative intercession (and a bit of soccer in between) was an awesome experience. I was really blessed when twice during the evening I led a bit of unplugged worship which ended up in prophetic song. Very hectic. The first time my body almost couldn’t bear God’s presence almost forcing me to stop playing guitar. The second time lasted at least 45 minutes (could have been 2 hours… I really don’t know) and consisted a lot of me declaring God’s heart to various people and bringing freedom. Most people present had never experienced prophetic song… so God’s grace was on me big time for this as I almost never do this in large groups. In fact only seldom in small groups do I burst out into prophetic song (fear of man).

So this was really awesome for me because I have had such a burden in my spirit that worship should be a platform for God to bring freedom and deliverance as we see happening in the old testament battles.

After the night of prayer was the day for the actual event. We had organised a youth event to take place after the main event in the evening. It was an incredible time of worship led by Tony (one of my new friends) and intercession for Springs. The last thing for the evening was for me to preach a message on sexual purity. Not an easy thing to talk about. In fact I blindly volunteered for it and regretted having said yes. But as in all things I knew that God’s grace would be there. Little did I know that God would be helping get closure on some issues from my past.

I knew the message had to grab their attention from the start. So it would need an introduction that I was not capable of conceiving.. And an introduction which I least expected (or wanted as a matter of fact) was exactly what God gave me during the night of prayer.

I will post the sermon up as soon as I finish expanding the bullets. The intro involves something that I have never spoken about nor ever been able to go to God with. God in is loving mercy (once again) has allowed me to come to terms with this and receive forgiveness and let go of bitterness that I was unaware of. **suprise**

Here are a couple of photos:

Some of the art from the boiler room

One of the guys came up with quite a clever little idea. Below is a poster that says "Jordan River". This person realised that for the main event everyone would have to walk across this poster to get into the venue... so everybody had to cross the Jordan river.

Here's me after the all night of prayer.... I know.. I know... I just keep getting better looking.

We had string haging from the ceiling of the boiler room. The idea is that you write down your prayer request on a piece of paper and peg it to the string. Then if you had nothing to pray about, you could go around reading peoples prayer requests and praying for them.

The passageway between all the rooms we were using for the boiler room

This is the crowd I preached to

Me preaching (while trying to take the mic out of the stand)

We ended with some more praise in which the crowd really participated well... so well in fact that while a procession was running around, the computer and video projector got knocked down and are now broken.