Stiff Crowd Surfing

Right - I have loads to post about so will attempt to add a few new posts in the next few days covering Greenbelt, Merseyfest and the National Portrait Gallery! There was a lot of blogging talk at Greenbelt, which has inspired me to update my blog more regularly, although I am currently fighting my husband's assumption that as I have a blog I am also a geek. He is the geek in this relationship!

Anyway, back to Merseyfest. It was a great week from my point of view and also from the point of view of the organisers according to a recent email. It was cool to meet up with other Christians and get our hands dirty doing stuff in the community. Our project involved clearing the ground of a burnt down youth centre as it had got rather over grown and unsightly. Although the pictures don't do it justice, we really did get a lot of done and it was very satisfying clearing a lot of the concrete and lino(!) The only down side was that the project didn't seem to be very sustainable as there are no firm plans to redevelop the site and some of the work that we did could probably be done by diggers in no time at all. However, it was great to show the local council that young people had travelled up from London to support their community. It has also hopefully raised awareness of the area, giving greater impetus for the council to develop the land in a way that is beneficial for the whole community. And the people that we worked with were ace!

So, this was our projects for the afternoon, but in the morning and on a couple of the evenings everyone got together for worship and teaching. And there was some great stuff being said. One of the people that spoke was Pete Grieg, accidental founder of 24/7 prayer. I had never heard him speak before and found him very funny and challenging. He reminded us that we are all carrying the good news of Jesus and God wants to use each and everyone of us to show others his love. We also spent time praying for the communities of Merseyside. One of the ways that we did it was by praying for all of the church leaders present - which involved crowd surfing. All of the church leaders that were present 'dived' from the front of the stage and were crowd surfed to the back of the marquee. I had a go and it was an amazing experience. I felt that it was prayerful and very symbolic to be help up in prayer (and of course literally help up) by so many others. The whole experience was powerful if a little scary... I was told later that I looked very scared and very stiff!!

I have never crowd surfed before as I have always found crowd surfers at gigs incredibly anti social. But it was a reminder to me that we do need to hold each other up in prayer and pray for our leaders.