Unite Southampton

Christians in Freemantle
4 July 2009
4-6pm Afternoon Tea at Philippa and Ken's
92 Richmond Road (023 8033 3999)
A chance for Christians in the area to meet each other.
Everyone's welcome - we hope to see you there.

As we've mentioned before, Chris and Becky are meeting with some other Christians in Freemantle to pray for the area and our witness there. A couple of new people have joined us and there's even the promise of more! If you live in Freemantle, get in touch and we'll let you know when we're next meeting.

If you don't live in Freemantle, why not start praying in your area. If you don't know any other Christians nearby, start praying yourself and I'm sure God will cause you to bump into someone else pretty soon.

Meeting with Kate, the PCSO was great. She is really enthusiastic about building community in the area. Basic requirement now is to get a team together and then we can get started. Will be a midweek evening. If you are interested in getting involved please let us know and we can keep you up to date with details.

We're meeting a local PCSO on Monday (in Freemantle) who wants to bring The Big Red Bus down and start a StreetLight team in the area. Chris and I have been musing on getting out and meeting the young people that hang around and have been on a quest to find others who share that vision. So, it looks like there's 3 of us...

Freemantle is not an important district of Southampton by any standards. In fact most people I talk to around the city don't even know where it is. Freemantle tends to get swallowed up by the larger district of Shirley (although we do have a Wikipedia entry).

But it is where we share our lives with the others that live in the streets around. Not that we do that much sharing. We aren't very good at it. Hopefully praying will help.Read more

On Saturday evening just gone, we spent a great evening with the 5 teenagers who are part of Freemantle Baptist Church. I reckon I'm still the best at ten pin bowling on the Wii, but I had to concede my performance on the dance mat could possibly do with a little work.

We are really hoping that this can be the start of working with teenagers in our area. It would be great to be able to link up with some of the other churches in the area and see what can happen.

Freemantle Baptist Church have a student placed with them from Moorlands College and we met her today. We are all very excited about the possibility of working with the youth in the area and are praying together to see what we could do. We are trying to make contact with other Christians nearby and planning to visit the other local churches to see what their thoughts are. Please pray for God to provide people with a heart to reach out to young people, and that we'd figure out what to do. A StreetLight team is a possibility if more people emerge...but why stop there?!Read more

We are meeting the minister of Freemantle Baptist Church on Thursday. We have met her before, and to be honest, not done a very good job of supporting them. Hopefully we can do this better this time.

We have emailed some of the other churches too so hoping for hear from them (although who knows if the email addresses we used are current).

I feel excited about what the Christians in this area can do to serve the community. Hopefully we will only be helpful in making this happen. 

At Unite we aim to help churches to work together in getting involved with young people who are not generally in the habit of coming to them. We have had some success doing this. However mostly we have ended up working with mostly larger churches that have youth workers. This is probably because it's easier doing that and it seemed like a good place to start.

This is good and useful. However it has some weaknesses. There are two that trouble us most. Read more

Where is local?

It's hard to know sometimes because you might live in a place but never spend any time there. What about people who spend most of their time at work, on projects, at a sports club?

Focussing your mission (by that I mean living out your life for God) locally - when you've worked out where that is - has huge benefits in terms of regular contact with people and possibly more understanding of the mindset in the area. You know what life is like there and you've got time with people there.Read more