So long, farewell and thanks.

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Hello everyone. Todd Warden-Owen here, the administrator at Llandudno Youth for Christ.

This will be my last Blog post for Llandudno Youth for Christ I’m sad to say. This is also going to be my last day working for Llandudno Youth for Christ. On Monday 1st March I start a new job with a soap manufacturing company.

I am sad to leave and I have so many fond memories to take with me of my time working for Llandudno Youth for Christ, but I trust that this is the next step for me in God’s plan for my life.

I’ve had so many amazing experiences and times working here. It’s been great being part of a family that really cares for each other and the young people that they serve. A family that wants to see young people reached with the life changing message of the gospel.

I’ve taken part in ridiculous games. I’ve acted in wacky versions of the Nativity story. I cooked food for many young people. Helped set up events that have changed young people’s lives as they’ve engaged with God. Helped out in school lunch time clubs and after-school drop in youth clubs. I’ve taught from the Bible during our Sunday night Bible Study group and led worship at various different events. It truly has been a blast and a privilege to serve God in such an amazing ministry that is continually looking for new ways to share the good news of Jesus with you people relevantly in Llandudno and beyond.

Talking of the good news, recently God has really been highlighting the following verse from the Bible to me, “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” – Colossians 1:27. God has been teaching me that He is so close that in fact He is in me. The same goes for you. As a believer, Christ is in you. You are never alone. You are never forsaken. He is with you and He is in you.

Wow!

That is so encouraging. The gospel is really good news, and it’s great to know that long after I’m gone, the work of Llandudno Youth for Christ will carry on and they’ll see many more young lives changed by Jesus.

This work is so worthwhile, please do be praying for it and supporting it financially, for it really does make a difference to so many young people.

Thank you for listening and supporting us. Ciao for now and be blessed!

 

Redefining Youth Work!

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With all the changes that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to our lives, here at Llandudno Youth for Christ we’ve had to adapt and learn new ways of reaching out to the young people in our area with the message of Jesus.

One of the ways in which we adapted was moving our Redefine, Sunday evening Bible Study discipleship group online. Via the wonders of technology and throughout lockdown we were able to regularly meet with the young people of Llandudno and beyond and share with them the good news of Jesus.

It’s been a different and interesting time getting used to the new format, but it has worked really well for us.

Now that lockdown is over we have returned to our face to face meetings at Ty Llywelyn Community Centre, albeit with social distancing rules abided by and followed.

The young people enjoyed their time online, but they were definitely pleased to be meeting together finally after so many months apart.

Last Sunday was our second week back together and everyone had a great time.

Thank you for continuing to support us as we went through lockdown and please do continue to support us in prayer, with finances and with volunteers. We really couldn’t do this without your help.

Have a great week and we’re looking forward to another great Redefine this coming Sunday.

Everest Base Camp – Today was the day…

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Today was the day I was to step onto a plane to Kathmandu in Nepal to begin the 80mile Trek to Everest Base Camp at 17,600ft.

Alas, instead I’m at home typing this.

This trip – from the top of the highest mountain in the Wales, Mt. Snowdon (3560ft), to the bottom of the highest mountain in the World – was to mark ten years of Youth for Christ in Llandudno and to launch a brand-new Youth for Christ Centre.

The great news, trip aside, is we have seen ten – now eleven years – of Youth for Christ in Wales, and we are going to launch a second centre in North Wales to see more young people meet with Jesus. Much more on this coming soon!

To be honest though, as a mountain enthusiast, I am a bit gutted. I was very much looking forward to the challenge and the chance to bring you all along with me as a way of marking this great adventure we’ve had together.

However, with the times being what they are, we want to be, first and foremost, responsible and take the greatest possible care of our neighbours. With that in mind, this is clearly not the time to go.

That said, the trip is not ‘cancelled’, it will be rescheduled instead, so do watch this space and remember thst you can continue to give at www.give.net/TimsBigTrek

I put this short video out last week to talk about it – have a watch. In the meantime, keep safe, keep praying, and keep hopeful!

All the best,

Tim

Around the bible in 80 days – by Sophie and Jess

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It’s amazing that two of our former young people have contributed towards a fantastic new devotional! Check out the story in their own words…

 

Around the bible in 80 days.

‘Around the world in 80 days’ is the name of a novel that came out in 1872. It tells the compelling story of two men

racing against time to travel the world in just eighty days. Of course travelling has become so much easier since then, with vast technology improvements, but in a post COVID-19 world travelling around the world in 80 days is probably near impossible. However, we would like to invite you to do something even better that is entirely possible, journeying through the Bible in eighty days, and we’d like to share with you a brilliant devotional that follows this theme.

‘One True God 80 Devotions’ is an eighty day devotional aimed at teenagers. The idea behind the title is taken from the image of a 180 degree turn – a complete change, a new direction, lives turned around for Jesus. Remember what your life was like when you committed to following Jesus – how much you changed? This book has been created to encourage and challenge teenagers to turn their lives around for Jesus.

This book, produced by Girlz 4 Christ Ministry in America, has been written by over 25 people from at least three continents. Each day starts with a verse or two from the Bible, the author shares a story or thought and it closes with a challenge/action point to encourage the reader to respond. Some of the topics throughout book include faith, friendship and leaning on God through all circumstances. We wrote pieces on self-worth, God-given gifts and social media among other things.

We b

elieve this book has the potential to be a great blessing, and we’re really excited to see what God does through it in the lives of, hopefully, many young people.

If this devotional sounds like something a teenager in your life would benefit from, please prayerfully consider gifting them a copy. ‘One True God 80 Devotions’ is available on Amazon in paperback and kindle format.
And please join us in praying as this challenging idea of a 180 degree turn for Jesus is brought to many teenagers all around the world.

Thank you

Sophie Spree and Jessica Edwards

I have so many monkeys! Working with high achievers.

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Yesterday’s ‘live Reverb thought’ began with me sharing some of my collection of stuffed monkeys. One of them in particular, Damien, was given to me by my youth worker (also called Damien!) back when I was a teenager.

It was about then as a young person that I realised I really wanted to go into ministry. This was quite a big deal for me because, as an academically high achiever, everyone wanted me to pursue something big and crazy. My English teacher wanted me to go into politics, my science teacher suggested research, my psychology teacher pushed psychiatry, and my geography teacher wanted me to pursue geology. All of these sounded fun and interesting but none of them brought my teenage heart alive like telling people about Jesus did. It came as a big shock to everyone then, when I withdrew from studying ‘PPE’ at Oxford and went instead to what my dad colourfully called ‘Vicar Factory.’

I sometimes wonder if a lot of youth work oddly sidesteps the ‘high achievers’, letting them just get on with it and work things out for themselves. I think if we do this then we will really let a lot of our young people down. They don’t need ‘leaving to it’, they need feeding, stimulating and challenging. They need to be held accountable to God’s calling on their lives so that they don’t just put all their confidence in their brain power or rely too much on their grades.

Being a high achiever doesn’t make you immune to anxiety, poor self-esteem, or immense amounts of stress (ask any university professor!). It can sometimes, however, make you incredibly lonely. Even saying ‘I’m a high achiever’ is enough for a teenager to draw bullying and resentment from both peers and adults alike. It’s also really difficult for a high achiever to distinguish between what they can do (in terms of their high ability) and what they should do (God’s calling on their lives). Because they get high grades, it’s too easy for leaders and parents to push them towards the former without much thought towards the latter. That’s called being trapped by achievement.

It’s so important that we engage a wide range of very different young people. At Youth for Christ we provide this through our growing variety of projects. However, as someone who was a high achiever myself when back at High School, I try hard to make sure that I’m keenly aware of those particular young people in our groups today.

Through one-to-ones, in depth studies, prayer times, Q&As, guidance counselling, and just through providing lots of opportunities to share, we have been able to offer real support to those young people who have the added stress and loneliness of doing well at school.

Youth for Christ is about reaching every young person. It’s strange how often we unknowingly leave some out because we think that they don’t need us. There are so many types of young people that need our attention and the high achievers are just one group who are often overlooked in youth groups.

So, what’s your area? Do you have experience with high achievement? What about sports, arts, additional needs? Are you naturally louder or quieter, loquacious or introspective? Do you love knitting, writing, cooking, reading, making videos, or playing the kazoo?

Not only is there room for all, we need a wide variety of volunteers to reach the enormous variety of young people who exist. Young people, after all, are just people – and they come in all the shapes and sizes that the rest of us do. Can you bring something unique to share with our young people? Get in touch and start a conversation with us about what you could add to those under our care today.

Can you help us out with YouTube?

Related to this, we have just started a YouTube channel for young people. This is being brilliant, but it’s very limited at the moment. We need 100 subscribers before we can advertise our own link to young people – which will make it far easier for them to see it and share it with their friends.

Can you subscribe to our new channel here and help us get there? You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz295XuUp4GFgb-0qOYUU_w

 

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

Can you guess how much of what we do is run by Volunteers?

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Today begins National Volunteer Week 2020. This is a perfect time to call out our awesome volunteers!

For the 2019 Annual General Meeting, we worked out that we work with around 5000 young people a year. Between 40 and 50 young people were spending at least an hour a week with us, some young people were spending ten hours a week with us (the average was about four hours a week). Lockdown notwithstanding, these numbers have grown over the last year.

The most important number we worked out, however, was that it takes about 150 ‘people hours’ a week to run Llandudno Youth for Christ, and two thirds of that is done by volunteers.

Two thirds of what we do is entirely voluntary!

100 hours a week is done by volunteers!

That means Youth for Christ in Llandudno simply would not exist without our incredible team of committed, passionate, compassionate, and tireless volunteers.

Did you know that we have over fifty volunteers at Llandudno Youth for Christ? Everything from our Saturday Café, our frontline youth work projects, one-to-ones, schools work, administration, management and governance – is fuelled and carried by our amazing volunteers.

I know I’m biased, but I believe our volunteers are simply the best in the world.

So this blog today, from my heart, is simply a huge shout out to our incredible team of volunteers.

Thank you. Every one of you. You know who you are. We know who you are. And young people are meeting Jesus because of you.

Happy Volunteers’ Week!

 

Photo by ray sangga kusuma on Unsplash

Merry Christmas! Wait… That’s not right.

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All youth workers have a quirk, something that they’re known for everywhere they go. For me it’s ‘Summer Christmas Karaoke’. Throughout most of my years as a youth worker, I have run a Christmas party at the end of the summer holidays.

This party includes all of the trimmings; tree, tinsel, mince pies, fairy lights, and Christmas songs. It’s fun, it’s festive, and it’s wonderfully ironic with the sun beating down hard outside.

So I imagine the question you’re all asking is ‘why?’ (Or perhaps more honestly you’re asking ‘what’s wrong with you, Tim?’) The answer of course, is ‘why not?’

At Christmas we focus on certain aspects of who Jesus is more than any other time of year. We think about Him being Emmanuel – God with us. We talk about his humility, His ultimate innocence, and the fact that He was born to save us. At Christmas we also celebrate community, drawing together around meals, fireplaces, and highly competitive games of Monopoly.

Tell me that Christmas doesn’t represent what we should be celebrating every single day? That’s a community of people gathered closely together around the person of Jesus.

Those two pillars might represent better than anything else what we build our work on at Llandudno Youth for Christ. That’s a genuine community, and a focus on Jesus. After all, we’re about seeing young people changed by Jesus!

Last night we had to cancel our Redefine online gathering because the technology failed us. The program Zoom had gone down pretty much worldwide, partially because of the amount of churches who all tried to meet at the same time. It’s good to think that church broke the Internet!

For us though it was gutting.

Whether it’s online or in person the Youth for Christ community love to gather together. The team and the young people have formed a genuine community that serve and support each other – and every time we gather we point to Jesus.

Over the last two years we’ve had some visits from national teams, speakers, and youth workers. Every single one of them have told us the same thing – they are blown away by how much everyone in our groups genuinely want to be there. That’s the gravity of our projects, a community of people who genuinely want to connect. I strongly believe that the glue for this is Jesus – God with us.

It’s interesting that some people think that you can’t teach young people about Jesus in youth groups, or that you’ve got to keep the ‘God slot’ really short and simple and just talk about teenage experiences with a bit of a God-bent on them. That’s just not been our experience. For us if you take the focus on Jesus away then the community doesn’t work anymore. Jesus is the heartbeat of the Youth for Christ community and we genuinely believe that He is the reason why what we do works.

So please keep standing with us, keep praying for us, keep supporting us financially so the focus can be where it needs to be, and do consider prayerfully whether God is calling you to be part of this community. If you love young people, love Jesus, and can leave your ego at the door to help everyone in the room connect, then maybe this is for you. Fill in the form below and let us know.

 

Almost a decade later!

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Hi folks – Tim here. 9 years and 18 days ago, my wife Katie and I left South London and moved here to Llandudno. 9 years and 12 days ago I started working for Youth for Christ.

What. A. Journey.

9 years. That’s 27 Christmas Parties, 360 Redefines, 360 Recesses, 540 Reverbs, 600+ one-to-ones, over 120 training sessions, 120 LiteBites with St. David’s, over 200 assemblies, 200 church visits, 54 God Games and Goats, 8 Refreshes, 8 National Conferences, 7 RE Conferences, 7 Soul Survivor trips, and literally – thousands – of young people. All together nearly 1500 individual events and projects.

That’s almost 1500 times we have spoken the gospel to young people. And this doesn’t include the projects or one-to-ones that now run completely without me like Recess at Ysgol Aberconwy, and Shuffle and Shake in Colwyn Bay.

1500 gospel opportunities. 1500 times we have told young people about Jesus.

We are always telling young people about Jesus. Constantly and consistently. Why? Because that’s why we exist! We’re about young people being changed by Jesus. That’s why we wake up in the morning, so more young people can meet with Jesus.

We believe there is nothing better in the world than knowing God through Jesus, and that there is no greater gift than helping a young person connect with Him for the first time. We love what we do – I certainly do!

So, thank you everybody!

Thank you so much for your support. It’s not always been an easy journey (we’ve had to move house 7 times!), but we’ve always felt welcomed and appreciated. Thank you for including us in your community and helping us feel at home.

More than anything though – thank you for helping me live out my calling every day, to tell young people about Jesus.

Thanks! 😀

 

Just one more is always worth it

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Hi folks – Tim here again. So yesterday I ended up in hospital for what turned out to be a badly sprained ankle. How did I do this? By trying to catch myself on camera ‘kickflipping’ a skateboard for our new YouTube channel. It didn’t work. (You can watch the video here).

This made me think of all the times throughout my youth work career where I have hurt or injured myself doing ridiculous things. I was slapped hard in the face once by a very drunk mum who tried to force herself into a youth club claiming we were selling drugs. Another time I was cream pied in the face at the end of a holiday club. That doesn’t sound too bad, however the teenagers on the team couldn’t quite decide who should do it… so logically they all did – hard – and I woke up in my office half an hour later.

I think the worst time was getting a concussion while raft building in a swimming pool. I was at camp, sitting precariously on a large barrel in the pool, when another leader jumped on top of me. The two of us – and the barrel – went right under the water, and the barrel shot back up catching me hard on the chin. There was quite a spectacular amount of blood! It wasn’t until after giving that night’s talk and driving myself to hospital that I found out that I was actually badly concussed. Who knows what I said during that message!

Why am I telling you all this? Well, as much as I genuinely enjoy sympathy, I do have a point. There is a cost to building healthy youth ministry.

As fun and silly as our projects sometimes look from the outside, youth workers do it all so young people can meet with God. Living your life trying to tell young people about Jesus – trying to point them towards Him in all that you do – is hard. Sometimes it looks like they’re getting it, and at other times it feels like they’re nowhere. You can spend hours pouring into a young person’s life – years even – only to have them walk away without a word.

Most Christian youth workers don’t last more than one contract period (2-3 years) and its easy to see why. One of the hardest things I experience as someone who’s been doing it quite a lot longer, is remembering all the young people who came and then went. I can still remember the faces, the names, and the conversations that I had with so many young people who I don’t know now. And sometimes that is a lot to bear.

Youth work comes with a cost, and that cost is putting in the hours, the sweat, the tears – and sometimes the injuries – for the strained hope that some of them will get it… however, many of them don’t. So is it worth it?

Last year one such young person who I had lost touch with sent me a message out of the blue from their final year of university. They told me that they had met with Jesus. They said that it was their time with us at Youth for Christ that put the pieces in order, so when the opportunity came, they were ready to connect with God. It was worth it for him.

Right now, a young woman who was one of our young people is in Israel on a gap year, making a significant difference in the lives of many families and children. She left school with amazing grades, but chose to do this rather than going straight to university. Her ministry is inspiring – and is inspired by her obvious love for Jesus. It was worth it for her.

A young person that I worked with years ago in London met with Jesus as a teenager, and went on to lead large justice missions in several third world countries in Jesus’ name. He tragically died just last month in a terrible car accident. I was heartbroken, but he went straight to be with Jesus, and he inspired hundreds of people to give it all for Him. It was worth it for him.

When I was at i61 Church a couple of years ago, the Pastor, Steve, had a saying: “just one more”. And he was right. All the effort is worth it for just one more young person to hear the gospel, and to know the God who loves them through Jesus who saves them. Just one more is always worth it.

I like to end these blogs with a ‘call to action’ and today that’s simple. Please pray.

Pray.

Pray.

Pray.

Pray for the work that we do. Pray for our incredible volunteers. Pray for our efforts. Pray for our protection.

More than anything though, pray for God to move in power and in permanence in the lives of these young people.

Please stand with us to pray.

Thank you.

A day in the life of a lockdown youth worker

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It’s an odd time for us all right now isn’t it? As a youth worker my time is usually spent going places, whether that’s going to schools to give assemblies, or coffeeshops for Bible studies, or just out to run our weekly projects.

There’s not so much ‘going’ at the moment though. So, what does a day in the life of a lockdown youth worker look like?

For me at the moment, my working day is made up of three main activities; admin, communication, and online delivery.

Admin includes everything from catching up on planning, editing videos, organising databases, researching grants and – especially at the moment – learning how to use technology in an efficient and effective way. If I don’t manage my time well – this can take all day!

Communication means answering emails, designing digital flyers, connecting with young people on social media, and of course, picking up the phone. People still exist, even in isolation, and we still want to reach out and connect up.

Online delivery is the space where our projects currently inhabit. This can be pre-recording videos, delivering live training, streaming thoughts, and leading video conference Bible studies. We are working hard to connect with people online at least three times a week using at least four different platforms.

Each working day is a varied mix of these three things – more than enough to keep a youth worker busy! There’s a little bit more on my plate than usual too as we’ve had to place our administrator on furlough.

I’m also trying to dig up the rubble from an old brick garage that’s buried in our garden – but that’s a whole other story!

It’s an odd time isn’t it?

That said, this time has made me so immensely grateful for all the hard-working team and volunteers that makes Youth for Christ really happen in Llandudno. Our board of trustees and council of reference are unmatched in their dedication to support this work; our front-line volunteers are an incredible mix of loving and committed examples of Jesus to young people; and all of our behind the scenes supporters – through running the Saturday Café, helping with admin, and helping get the word out to churches – are what makes anything I ever do just work!

This is definitely not a one-person operation!

Youth for Christ in Llandudno is the marshalling of about fifty people – all committed to seeing young people changed by Jesus.

When all this is over, we’re still going to be looking for more help. Do you feel the call of God on your life to help young people come to know Jesus? Can you speak to teenagers, pray faithfully, edit videos, manage databases, cook food, plan outings, drive safely, lick stamps, proofread resources, raise money? Can you move boxes, play games, listen actively, explain the Bible, and exercise a mix of fun and patience? Do you work well in a team and want to bring the best out of those around you? – Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!

Use the form below, and we’ll get back to you asap!.