Unite Southampton

This is the second in our series of our story so far. This is more of a personal reflection than anything else, hopefully to help us decide where we go next. You can read the first part here.

It took over a year to plan, organise, fund raise and the nerves were high as the doors opened on the first Lift event. The music was great, the punters had fun it but the testimony from one of the bands went on a bit too long. Enough people turned up to make it worthwhile. However it was whilst reflecting on this that we realised the flaw in the plan.

There was no strategy, we just put on an event. A good event. But what use is it? It was run almost in isolation with what was going on around the city. We hadn't talked to other youth groups. We hadn't got involved with others working with teenagers in parks, schools, estates so that they could come and use the event as part of their ongoing work.

It was reflecting on this that we figured that for our event to be useful we needed to get working with others. That's where the Unite bit came from.

We also decided it was a good idea to start a detached project working with teenagers in estates. Initially this was called “The Lift Bus” project, as it involved getting a bus and writing “Lift” on the side. I love this story. It really helped me to see how God works. I'm going to tell it for the thousandth time. Sorry if you have heard it before.

We applied for £5000 to buy the minibus. We got rejected. Unbelievable ... what is God up to? We needed that money. The next day I got a call from Colin Baker. He had a very old bus, a bit of a wreck. But we could have it for free. OK so far. Oh, it needs storing off road as it has no road tax. Ahh. Mike and Ruth live just round the corner. We can leave it on their drive for a few days whilst I think of something.

A few days later Mike cornered me whilst out at the Soul Cellar. “That old bus on our drive....”. “Umm, sorry about that, gonna move it” and such like. “No” he says, “I've been thinking about it”. And on he went to explain what needed doing to fix it up. “Whatever you think best” he said. I had no idea what was best. He seemed to. Maybe he would be in charge. Great, he would. And it turned out that Ben would help. And so would Katherine and many others. As filler replaced the thin air where the rust had been, paint rubbed down and more slapped on and various bits fell off and hit people; a team formed. A team that wanted to go out into the streets and tell teenagers about Jesus. We hadn't had a team before and now we had. And if we had simply got a nice minibus that didn't have rust and holes we still wouldn't have a team. God had a minibus and a team and I'll never forget that.

It seemed that God was helping us. It felt exciting. We were organising monthly prayer meetings and people were coming from different churches to pray together for the young people in the city. We met at a little church in James Street on the Golden Grove estate ate bacon sandwiches and asked God to do stuff. Our little organisation was taking off.