Ignite Hope

Hey everyone! I’m back after a long weekend at Ignite Hope. For those who don’t know what is was all about, it was a weekend of doing good deeds in the name of Jesus. The days were broken down like this:

• 9:30am: Morning Worship
• 10:45am: Break into teams
• 11:00am-12:30pm: Travel to assigned area.
• 12:30-5:15pm: Social Action projects (more on what we did later)
• 5:15-7:00pm: Dinner, then travel back to main area in Cardiff city centre.
• 7:30-9:00pm: Evening Meeting
• 9:15pm A Music Gig featuring a Christian group every night

I was co-leading a team that went out to a couple of villages in the northern part of South Wales called Pontyclun and Mountain Ash (For the international audience among you, ask me for the pronounciations of the towns another time!). Saturday was spent painting a Church hall in Pontyclun. The people who had organised our projects (they were two local Pastors) were only expecting about 9 people, but there were 16 people in our group! In the end, they had to find extra things for us to do, because we had finished the initial job so quickly!

Sunday afternoon, and most of Monday too, was spent refurbishing a garden in a village outside Mountain Ash, that had been created originally as a community project for a TV show here. Unfortunately, it had fallen into a state of disrepair, so we refurbished it with new plants, cleaned up the rubbish that had colelcted around the site, and even relaid the main sign of welcome into the site.

As well as that, Monday was also spent painting the kitchen of the aforementioned Church Hall, as well as some houses. We acheived a lot (we apparently did the equivalent of a whole month’s work in three days!), but here are some of my personal highlights from the weekend:

• As one of the leaders in the group, it was great to see the passion the guys in the group had, both for God, and for the things we were doing. Nornally, it should be the leaders inspiring them to get passionate about it, but it was them that inspired me!
• Joy (who was the Pastor of the Church whose hall we painted) told me that when she walked ito the hall on Sunday morning  to see how it looked finished and dry, she began to cry when she realised just what had been acheived. She also told me that because the Church is getting quite elderly in age, she knew that they would not have been able to do this themselves.
• A total of 6 young people became Christians as a result of the work we’d been doing this weekend.

As if that wasn’t enough, I was also a member of the Prayer ministry team for the weekend, where again, God did some amazing things. I was paired up with an old friend for the weekend, and amongst other things:

• We were able to personally lead one person to Jesus, and prayed with another right after they’d done the same.
• We prayed for another whose Grandmother had breast cancer (a theme very close to my heart, but that’s another story for another time).

So in short, God did some amazing things over the weekend. As a closing thought, the one thing that had driven me all weekend (apart from God of course!) was LifeChurch’s mission statement:

To lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ.

I felt that the whole team, even if the majority of them hadn’t heard the phrase before this weekend, managed to do just that, and I am so proud of what God was able to do through us!

Thanks for reading.