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Viewpoint from Wendy Bircham for 1st March 2013
Wendy Bircham
Licenced reader at St Andrews, Gorleston
Scooters, hot chocolate, marshmallows and God.
This is c hurch. Not as we know it, but for many young people in our town this is how they see church, and it seems they can't get enough of it.
I’m always surprised (and delighted) at how God can use me in the most unusual places and always out of my comfort zone, be it abroad, preaching, or at the front of a High school assembly talking about ant farms and God baby as the Christmas message (which incidentally worked).
As I am getting older I find it a little stretching God’s limits by the role I have had for the past year or so as a “doorman” for 'Identity' the Christian Youth outreach groups here in Gorleston. A job not for the faint hearted. Now the young people who come along are ether sympathetic to my age, or just sorry for me when I take their names for the registrar and say pardon how do you spell your name. Where have these modern names come from!! They certainly aren’t found in my baby naming books.
Ruth; 'Identity's' youth leader has some zany brilliant ways to get the Gospel message across. Like the time one evening late September when she thought the group could do some community outreach and do some litter picking. “Wendy can you come and help”. "Yes, sure Ruth, I said.” Not then knowing that my job would be to sit in the middle of the common on a deck chair manning the juice bottles and first aid box. I sat alone for what seemed  to have been a couple of hours as dusk began to fall. Passersby were giving me a wide berth and dogs too. I think I resembled a homeless person. Thankfully the group returned black bags full and the common free from litter for that night.
We are never sure who might come along to an 'Identity' event, so one particular winter Sunday evening we were amazed when not just one young person who hadn’t been before arrived, but God sent us a dozen young people who had never been inside a church before. A little thrown by the size of harvest God had sent us we trusted Him for words of wisdom and guidance. “Why not let them each take a Bible home”. said Ruth. It was then an amazing miracle happened when one young man opened his Bible and took out a folded piece of paper which was tucked inside and read the words written on it. " Jesus is your Saviour". The colour drained from the young man’s face and his jaw dropped to the floor. We silently praised God for His wonderful well timed intervention.
God is doing something new in the lives of young people in our town, it may be unconventional to many of us but the young people are responding and meeting Jesus in unpredictable numbers. Please give our youth workers support, encouragement, and prayer. Isaiah 43:19.
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