Last week we had a mission in our local secondary school, Faringdon community College. The mission was led by a group called Collective who are a group of three young ladies based in South West England (there are other collective bands around the country). Each morning year group assemblies were taken and then several lessons took place throughout the day, the lessons were in dance, drama, music and RE. each session gave the young people a chance to have some fun but also to explore some issues, things like dance after spending some time learning a routine there was a short chat about how we dance and the differences between what we might see on MTV and the image that is often portrayed through such dance compared with the dance they had been learning and saw the girls performing. Some lessons also gave a chance to ask the panel questions with the one rule being ‘if you can ask the question sensibly, you will get a sensible answer’ (in other words ask us about anything, nothing was out of bounds but you have to be mature in asking, not goggling cos it’s a slightly embarrassing subject). This all worked really well and over the week we must have seen somewhere in the region of 600-700 young people in lessons. The week ended with a concert on the Friday night to which we had 130 turn up (this is a good number considering the dispersed nature of the catchment area of the school meaning over 50% of pupils have to be bussed in). the concert ended with a kind of testimony/preach from Nikki one of the band members which was really well presented and very heartfelt and honest, after the talk there was an opportunity to say a pray and come and find out more, we had 52 young people come out at the end to chat which was fantastic and having done the first follow up session this week we had around 30 turn up for that. Exciting times for Faringdon, we pray that this might be the start of something in the school and the town.
This week myself and my colleague from the Baptist Church are taking assemblies in the local secondary school, Monday was cancelled due to exams, so yesterday was our first one. The theme we have is peer pressure, we start the assembly with me being hand cuffed and talking about how pear pressure can trap us and that whilst sometimes it can be good quite often peer pressure is a negative influence as I talk about this Stephen (my Colleague) pokes me with a stick while suggesting several things I might like to do, all good fun (for him). The idea is that I then talk about the need to break free from peer pressure, however yesterday I failed to get out of the cuffs, I don’t know why I just could not get out and in the end had to get the keys out of my pocket (not easy with hands cuffed behind back and keys in front pocket) and then get Stephen to let me out. This morning I practiced a couple of times before the assembly to make sure it didn’t happen again. WE arrived at the school and went through to the hall to wait as usual but no-one turned up, we got up to leave and discovered that the hall we had walked through to get to the gym where we do our assemblies was being used for a different year group assembly so we couldn’t get out that way. The only trouble is that was the only way through to the gym block without going out of the building, but because no one had come into the block yet the other exits from the block were still locked Trapped again! We eventually got rescued when a PE teacher turned up.
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