In response to the ALOVE launch, at Hadleigh we held an ‘ALOVE Feast’ over a Sunday lunchtime, where we had the traditional Sunday lunch of Pizza and coke at the hall and discussed as a youth group how ALOVE was going to impact us.

As a leadership team it had been on our hearts to change the focus, direction and ethos of our group for a while, which looking back must have been the Lord getting us ready.

On the day of the launch, we watched the ALOVE video again, and started breaking down the four areas of worship, discipleship, mission and social action to see how what we did as a group fitted in to this plan. We discovered we had some good stuff in some areas, some that fitted in by accident, and that we spent a fair amount of time doing stuff that didn’t really seem to have much point at all. We also found that we were doing nothing towards real social action and very little to do with mission.

From here, we started coming up with ideas, thoughts and concepts that matched the four essentials but also reflected our own personalities and vision. This slowly evolved into a draft Mission Statement, from which we plan to re-invent our Youth Group and become the vibrant and impacting expression of God’s Kingdom in this place that we know He wants us to be.

For me as a youth leader, the whole experience has left me feeling focussed, enabled and reinvigorated after a seemingly long and uncomfortable period in which I was struggling to find direction or method in my youth work. The majority of the youth guys now have complete ownership of the mission statement, our vision and direction as a group, and are for me, for the first time, really starting to look to the future and outside of themselves and our group to express their walk with God.

Peter Worth
CYS, Hadleigh Temple