News

There is a weird story in the Biblical 2^nd book of kings where, in a rush, a group of men throw a dead body into Elisha’s tomb, and on making contact with Elisha’s bones, the dead man is brought back to life! It’s as though there was unused energy, unfinished business, excess life even, in the decaying bones of the great prophet.

At our St Christopher’s Youth Church, we are determined that this will not happen to us. We don’t want to die with the secret recipe that could help the next generation to lift their game to do life at a higher level. We realise that giving away is the ultimate destination of all fullness. God Himself is drawn to emptiness. This has been true since the beginning when the Spirit of God filled the primordial chaos with His own presence and brought beauty and order into being. We have learned that as we empty ourselves, God replenishes our reserves with all that we need. This has been especially important this year with our tireless emphasis on social action, particularly recently, as we have started to deliver the content of the Archbishop of York’s young leader’s award. We don’t want to die with things we wish we’d said or done, or with ideas we never passed on. In short, we want to live full, but die empty.

We are grateful to God that we are starting to be given a voice to help others who might be in a similar situation to us in thinking about starting their own youth church in different parts of the country. Whereas our primary calling will always be to grow our own youth church, we always count it a privilege if we find ourselves in a position where we can allow people to stand on our shoulders, giving them a shortcut to accelerate their learning on issues that took us considerably longer to navigate because there was nobody who had been there before to do the same for us.

So may you go to bed at the end of each day knowing that you gave the day everything you had. May you be intentional about giving yourself away to others every day, so that when you die you are not buried with treasures of unshared wisdom from your life. You have far more locked up within you from your life’s experience than you’d ever think

“Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man’s body into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet.”
2 Kings 13:21

Mr Pountain
Head of Religious Education / Director of Spirituality