At the end of June, we organised a weekend away with twelve key young people who are all involved with First Sunday, our monthly youth worship service in Leamington. The purpose was to spend time seeking God for vision for the way ahead with First Sunday.
First Sunday has been going for many years and lots of young people have benefitted from it. However, it has become increasingly clear recently that there could be more to what we do. Rather than just steaming ahead with new ideas, we wanted to gather together, as leaders, to explore how we might move ahead and to spend time praying for God’s guidance.
The time away had people coming from 7 different churches, and a mix of teenagers and adults, all who have been committed to First Sunday for some time. We wanted to build relationships with each other, to have fun together, to dream together and to pray together.
Char Bevan, founder of local charity ‘Flourish‘ and a wonderful local youth leader, facilitated us over the weekend in praying for those around us: in our schools, our communities, our churches and the wider world. These were really helpful in enabling us to keep our eyes focused on those who don’t yet know Jesus and to see how First Sunday can be open to God leading us to influence those around us.
From the weekend, there was wide agreement that First Sunday needs to evolve and transform. Plans will soon be announced for the way ahead. What these plans will include will be enabling Christian young people from across the area to continue to meet together every month. But it will not be the same thing each time. Sometimes we will meet to celebrate all that God is doing and to worship him through contemporary music. Other times we will meet together for fun and fellowship, enabling us to get to know each other better and build stronger links across the church youth groups. We will also be introducing an action programme, where we will be enabling the young people to share their faith with those around them. This might be through social action projects, evangelistic events or through setting up school prayer groups.
What we want to see is all Christian young people growing in relationship with God and learning to share this love in a natural way with those around them, wherever they might find themselves.
It was a privilege to lead this weekend and to see how much unity there was amongst us and agreement on the way ahead.
As a result, First Sunday will not happen in September. We will be pausing to take time to prepare for a new-look launch, planned for the new year. We will have some low key events in the autumn to keep contact with young people and their leaders, and to help include everyone in the planning.
If you want to be involved in helping make this new-look First Sunday happen, or just want to be kept up to date with the developments, then do get in touch.