Newcastle Outreach

A week after getting back from Wales, we left for outreach! One team left for Liverpool and my team headed up to Newcastle to work with the pioneering YWAM team there (my old DTS roommate, Stephanie, is now a part of the team). The outreach went very well, with our team matching all of the YWAM leader’s expectations for a short term outreach. Because of the outreach we did with different churches and ministries in the city, there are doors that used to be closed that are now permanently open for the YWAM team to invest into.

One of the first things that we did was a faith day. We split the trainees into two different groups and they left the house for twelve hours with no money or food. They had five minutes to pray and then leave. It was an amazing day of tears, provision and learning to work as a team. We also led a Messy church for kids, worked quite a bit with a youth centre in the arts and sports, worked with a homeless ministry and had the trainees plan an arts day in the park. The arts day consisted of us wanting to be a light in the park by handing out flowers, playing sports with kids and writing encouragements with chalk on the sidewalk.

I also got the opportunity to plan and lead an empty slot of creative outreach in the streets. We took a couple of minutes to pray for a word or phrase to focus on and then wrote questions regarding the theme. The theme turned out to be hope and freedom so we wrote phrases on cardboard and 'What brings you hope?' on a white board. We got various reactions (mostly positive, which was good) and quite short, key conversations with different people. The people in Newcastle were very willing to stop, read the signs and then talk about it with us.

We also went into lots of youth groups. There was one youth group that myself and another trainee went to that opened a door for the long-term Christian youth leader to follow up on. There were only two girls at the youth group (it was during vacation time so about 10 girls were missing), so we just played card games with them, ate food and got to know them. For the last part, I got to share my testimony of how God is a friend, that he speaks to us and the reason for life. I could tell that one of the girls was listening very carefully to what I was saying and I was expecting her to ask questions at the end. We ended up leaving without any real discussion afterwards, however, a couple of days later, our host got a call from the youth leader saying that the girl was now asking questions about God (she never has before) and opening up about things that she had never shared. 

It was awesome how something like that could come out of a short term outreach and reaffirmed the benefit of short term outreach. It’s to come alongside long-term ministries and to even act as a catalyst for different things. And that ended up happening a lot in Newcastle. Most of the time, we would work with existing ministries that had Christian workers but held lots of unchurched, non-Christian participants. They always allowed us to come in and to speak about Jesus as openly and honestly as we wanted to. And through that, lots of conversation came up with us but also with the workers after we had left.

Myself with another staff, Stacy

Creative Outreach

Arts Day in the park