the whirlwind summer

I have gone radio silent, and I am sorry for that! The London summer is short, and on our team, it is our busiest season.

July turned out to be a manic month. After searching long and hard for a new house to accommodate some of our 31 students in the July DTS, Rebecca, Meli and I moved to Hackney, East London in the first week of July. As a team, we've been praying to move to and be more involved in East London for a while now, and God came through (as per usual) in His perfect time that felt quite tight for us, which meant that we moved in only a week before nine new students arrived. But the team pulled together and built beds, assembled the makings of a kitchen, and helped us break in our new barbecue grill that came with the house.

I am still completely overwhelmed by the goodness of God - I've been praying for East London for several years now, and I see how He especially prepared me for it throughout the spring. On my birthday, I asked God to use my year straight to the edges. And let me tell you, He has been faithful to do just that! With all of the different ministries that we are up to, the events that we get to host and take part in, the schools and other training programmes, and with Think (our coffee shop) and Hope and Anchor, time is being stretched in new ways. I feel like we shouldn't be able to do it all, but God has been building our muscles over time. We don't want to miss any blessings that He has for us or any ways that He wants to use us, so instead of putting our own limits, we keep trusting.

Our current Discipleship Training School started the second week of July and has 31 students - it is the largest DTS ever in YWAM in London! We have six houses strung like pearls on a necklace across London, from West London to our house in Hackney, East London. When I look back three years and remember how excited we were to get our second house, this feels absolutely mad. Several teachers and pastors that came to visit us in the early years of Radiant said that it was time for us to stretch the edges of our tent, and they were right!

A couple of weeks ago, we held a community barbecue in the alley next to Think, and we had somewhere around 100 new friends come through. They were everyone from homeless to gypsies to families to our regular Think customers. At one point, I put down my camera and looked across the crowd to see all of our different ministries in one place: the barber from Think was giving a free haircut to our homeless friend Nobby, and our regular cafe customer Saranya was chatting to a woman from Hope and Anchor. Our DTS students sat on the dirty pavement in order to have conversations with some homeless that we'd never met before while one of our Hope and Anchor ladies made jollof rice (a Nigerian speciality) for everyone. And the next Sunday, some of our homeless friends even came to Hope and Anchor for the first time since we moved into the cinema location!

In two days, we begin Arise London/Bones Camp, our outreach to the city of London leading up to Notting Hill Carnival. If you've been on this journey with me for any amount of time, you are probably familiar with Bones. I love it, because it is our push all together as a base. We put other activities on pause in order to reach out to our city in a massive way. Could you pray for us as we step into it, that God would prepare the hearts of our team, of the campers who come from outside to join us, and for the people that we will meet in the streets? Will you pray for health, safety and for God to move? We saw many people get saved last year, and we are trusting that many more will encounter Jesus this year as we hit the streets! So that update is certainly coming up!

And finally, my Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) is nearly fully funded - thank you so much for giving so extravagantly! I will be applying for it when I return from the International Arts + Sports Gathering in NYC in October. So I will be back in September with an update on Arise London/Bones and to share about the Gathering (which I get to help organise, and which is one of my favourite events that we hold as a team).

But once again, thank you all for your prayers, for your support and for your faithfulness. We are in such an exciting time as God is opening up new sectors of life (business primarily!) for our team to touch, and the places that we find ourselves are always surprises. I couldn't have dreamt all of this for myself, so I'm so glad that God dreams for all of us and enables us to move as a family through it together. So thank you for being a part of this family with me, for loving God and trusting Him along with me. You guys are incredible!

A Brief Summer-y

Does it feel like autumn to you?

Tuesday night ended both our Bones Camp/Notting Hill Carnival outreach and the Discipleship Training School that I was co-leading with Melo and Andres, and the leaves have begun to litter the kerbs, which leads me to believe that autumn is here. But perhaps you are in warmer climes, and you are still enjoying the heat of summer (shoutout to my parents and grandparents). 

Anyway, now that the British summer is over, I finally have the chance to sit down and share what we did (aka a summer-y). 

This summer, I helped to lead a two-month outreach around England for our March DTS and June Internship. We went to Notting Hill, where we did prayer walks and evangelism in preparation for our Notting Hill Carnival festivities. Afterwards, we traveled to Islington in North London, where we stayed whilst our base hosted the International Arts + Sports Gathering for artists from around the world. The week after that, we helped New River Baptist Church to run a holiday club (aka a VBS) for children on the estate where we were staying (an estate is social housing). Some of us got to create and pioneer the teen portion of the holiday club, and we taught the teenagers parkour, football (aka soccer), fashion design, and writing as well as having film night and American culture night. It was amazingly comedic to watch them learn to play American football. From there, we travelled to Cornwall (the western-most part of England) to volunteer at Creation Fest, a week-long Christian festival. Afterwards, it was back home to London and Bones Camp, which, as I said, finished three days ago.

And there you have it, a two-month outreach in one paragraph.

But what I really want to share with all of you is a conversation that I had with God several times this summer. After all of the evangelism that we did in Notting Hill in early July, I began to get a bit frustrated. Conversations weren’t going anywhere, and I realised that it had been a long time since I had gotten to be with somebody as they made a faith decision. Sure, I’ve had a hand in the process. I’ve gotten to disciple and watch many people’s lives as they chose to change for Christ. But I haven’t seen the moment when a person chooses to give Jesus everything. And it was really starting to frustrate me. 

At Creation Fest, we were each assigned to teams that we worked in for the week. My team was the Connect Team, or the team that prayed with people at the end of the “Big Shed” sessions (the main talks that most of the 4,000 people on site at the festival attended in the morning and night every day). I thought that surely I’d get to help somebody receive Christ, since that was what the whole festival was geared towards. Families literally brought their unsaved neighbours to camp with them for a week just so that their neighbours would meet Jesus. It was incredible. But as the days went on and I had the opportunity to minister to many, still nobody made a decision to follow Christ.

Enter Connie. Connie is well-known across YWAM England as an evangelist. When she enters a place, people receive Jesus. I remember being with her on a street in Glasgow and watching her talk to people. Large groups or one-on-one, they all decided to meet Jesus. Connie had breakfast with me one morning at Creation Fest, and she asked how many people had met Jesus. I had to tell her that nobody had. Then she gave me one of the salvation bracelets that she uses to tell people about Jesus and told me that I’d need it.

Later that day, I got to be a part of three women’s faith decisions. That night, as I was standing in the back of the Big Shed, a teenager came to me, desperate for Jesus. It turns out that he’d gotten in trouble with the police at the festival skate park and realised how much he needed to meet Jesus. There wasn’t a Bible around, so I used the bracelet Connie had given me to explain salvation. He wore it around his wrist as he went to re-join the teens for Milkshake Night.

It didn’t end there. I was excited, but I wasn’t satisfied. And do you know why? Because I realised that I’d never seen somebody receive Christ at Notting Hill Carnival. When Chris met with us before Bones Camp began, he told us to raise our expectations. He said that God wanted to do something incredible. So for several days, I wrestled with that. I wanted to see salvation, but I didn’t have a lot of hope for it. 

On the Saturday night before Carnival, we were outside until 3:30 am, preparing the angel costumes. I watched Chris lead a man to Christ in front of us. The man came up with marijuana and somehow ended up leaving with Jesus. It gave me hope, and when I came out of the church again a few hours later to take photos, I stopped to talk to the first man that I saw. He was an older Belgian man. At the point in the conversation where I normally would have said goodbye, I decided to stay and ask him why he didn’t believe in Jesus. Fast forward a few (very  awkward) minutes, and he received Jesus.

On the Monday afternoon of Carnival, whilst I was on stilts in an angel costume, Peri and I talked to another man. We asked him if he believed in Jesus, and he said no. But as we talked to him about how much Jesus loves him, he started to cry. He really wanted to receive Jesus, and he prayed to receive him before we could even work up to leading him in the prayer. It was incredible to stand in that swirling chaos of high and drunk people and to watch a man give his life to Jesus.

This summer is a crazy blur. When I look back at everything that God did, I am amazed. We had artists come from all over to share their hearts for God and the arts. We got to help several different churches and organisations in their summer activities. And we got to be God’s hands and feet across this city. I am well tired now, but it was worth every night of little sleep. It is always worth it to see God move in mighty ways. 

Floris, one of my DTS students, praying for a man at Hope and Anchor Community Church

Talking to some of our new friends at a Hope and Anchor barbecue

a session of The International Arts + Sports Gathering

Everybody in this picture is called Deborah (from our teen camp in Islington)

Camping expectations vs reality (from Creation Fest in Cornwall, where we camped for nearly two weeks)

Raising our 5 metre Cross in Shoreditch during evangelism/barbecue time in a park

Courtney in the angel costume for Carnival

Sharing during Notting Hill evangelism at Bones Camp

(thank you to Joseph, Alexa, and Nestor for the photographs of me!)

words that shine like sunny rays

Every Saturday for years, we have gone to Portobello Road Market to do evangelism. The evangelism has turned random conversation into relationships, so that now when I walk down Portobello, I get to move like a local, stopping to chat with so many of the people that I see. It can take a while for Londoners to warm up, and many weeks conversations seem to fall flat. So we pray as we walk away and wait for the next Saturday.

One of my favourite Saturday friends is called Dolly. She is 91 years old, and she has been working in the market since she was 14. Her hands are gnarled and often bleed from her excema. A few months ago, she let me start praying for her hands when I buy my weekly punnet of blueberries. In the middle of the chaos of bagging up produce, she stops, and we pray. And this week, after I prayed for her, she told me that she loved me.

I don't really know much of Dolly's story, in spite of seeing her every week for years. But her words remind me of our hope, the reason that we walk down the market every Saturday. We have gone years without seeing anyone meet Jesus. But actually, that assumption is wrong. They meet Jesus every week. And even when we can't see the change inside of them, even when we feel that conversations have fallen on deaf ears, that the effort isn't paying off, something is happening in the deep places.

It is for these deep places that we fight.

the joy that comes

Autumn is firmly on its way now. Leaves clutter the kerb outside of our house, and we have had to unpack the cardigans and warm socks that we hid away in our summer optimism. But for me, the year turned two weeks ago, when we opened the door of Westbourne Grove Church on a Tuesday morning to find the streets of Notting Hill in their normal, tidy state. The chaos of the previous two days, when two million people descended on the neighbourhood for the Notting Hill Carnival, had disappeared literally overnight. 

Notting Hill Carnival and Bones Camp were different this year than they have been in the five previous years that I’ve taken part. For obvious reasons: we no longer host it at Notting Hill Community Church, and recent terrorist attacks as well as the Grenfell Tower fire in June have changed the atmosphere of Notting Hill. But to be honest, I was ready for a change. I had grown comfortable with Bones Camp (well, as much as one can in a camp that includes minimal sleep or showers), and I needed to be reminded of the purpose. Last year, we expanded Bones Camp to reach more of London. We continued that this year, and throughout the twelve days of Bones, we went to Notting Hill, Portobello Road Market, King’s Cross, Trafalgar Square, and Shoreditch. We all went to church together in Camden on the first Sunday, as well, which felt like taking an army into our Promised Land. 

Every year, you hear me say the same things about Bones. We created floats, we walked on stilts, we drummed. We did all of those things this year. But instead of creating a visual marvel this year, we did our floats and costumes on a smaller scale and focused on being intentional with people. I believe that God loves a spectacle that brings Him glory - if He didn’t, would have have vanquished His foes by luring them into the Red Sea and then drowning them all spectacularly? Would He have made Himself a cloud of fire to lead the Israelites by night, or sent massive plagues onto the nation of Egypt? But God is also the King of subtlety. He sent an earthquake and a whirlwind past Elijah, but He was in the whisper that came afterwards. And Jesus Himself did amazing miracles, but according to Isaiah, He wasn’t the most handsome, charismatic man. Different years of Notting Hill Carnival lead us to express different dimensions of God’s heart. 

Notting Hill is hurting this year. Grenfell Tower exposed the truth of the gap between rich and poor in Kensington and Chelsea. The tower is visible from all around Notting Hill, yet it may as well have been invisible for all the attention given it before the fire. Even now, after the fire, the gap between rich and poor is drastic. The people of Grenfell have had money thrown at them, but it isn’t helping them. In the case of our Dinner Club acquaintances who lived in the tower, it has led them into a spiral of buying drugs and remaining drunk. There isn’t anybody to help them cope with what has happened, so they are destroying themselves to try to forget what has happened and to fill the gaps left by the friends who didn’t make it out. During Bones Camp, we met with one man in particular who we used to hang out with at Dinner Club and around Notting Hill. He had brand new designer sneakers and a new phone, as well as new accommodation, but he also had a new drug addiction. His life is in worse shambles now than it was before.

One my favourite moments of Carnival was when we paraded up the street with signs and rhythms proclaiming joy and life. Grenfell rose behind us, a shadow of what has happened this year, but we got to make new proclamations over the ground. We spent the afternoons of the Carnival talking to people, handing them handwritten promises from the Bible like, “You are not alone,” and, “You are loved.” And we were there. That is what we are called to be: to be there, and to be Love. We were there to meet people as they tried to fill the emptiness of a year, as they tried to forget what has happened, as they tried to find a reason to celebrate, as they drank overpriced beer and danced pressed against strangers and took recreational drugs. 

I love photographing the Carnival, because it gives me a chance to step back and see what is really happening. But I also love going on stilts, because people love to stop and chat. In that moment, we get to give them love and truth. This year, I got to go on stilts in the second afternoon, and I had so much joy from God as I handed out promises to the hordes of people coming down the street. Many stopped to ask what they meant, and we all got to explain the truth about God that flies in the face of everything they’ve heard from the media, from society, from school, about who God is. He is Love, and He is in the middle of Carnival, ready to encounter them.

But isn’t that just like our Father, to be where we least expect Him, inviting us to run back to His open arms?

Eric riding one of our floats and drumming in the main Carnival parade.

a snap of me at Carnival

Alli and Gabby walking on stilts in the main Carnival parade.

two of the people that I spoke to in the Carnival

Melo and I doing evangelism in the Carnival

Parading through the streets of Notting Hill

Going up a street with the shell of Grenfell Tower in the background

Amanda with two of her co-workers, who came to the picnic that we had before Carnival

A performance that we gave for the neighbourhood before Carnival

One of the best parts of being on a housing estate (social housing) is the sense of community. We held a picnic/pre-Carnival party for them, and we spent the evening hanging out and getting to know them.

we call out to dry bones

This year was my fifth Bones Camp and Notting Hill Carnival, and I thought that I finally had it down. I knew how to reduce my caffeine intake in the months leading up to Bones so that caffeine would have its full effect again. I knew which clothes to pack for all ranges of weather, which snacks to buy to have maximum energy, when was the best time to take showers. I felt prepared.

But Bones was different this year. It was part of Arise, our month of reaching out to all of London, which meant that we got to go on evangelism to different parts of the city each day. There were also a lot more of us YWAM Radiant team members there, and everybody carried different weights of the week so that a lot more of us got to focus on reaching out to people, which is my favourite part of Bones. The theme of Bones was worship, and we worshipped in different ways throughout the days and nights of Bones and Arise.

During the first weekend, the whole camp packed up and went to Shoreditch for a night to work with a church there. We went on outreach from our outreach, and we got to take everybody to touch a part of the city that we love. Our drummers were warriors, drumming through the streets of Shoreditch and declaring God's victory over the area. Their noise attracted a lot of people, and we got to have deep conversations with many of them who perhaps wouldn't normally stop to talk to us.

We also had Tred with us, a dance and percussion team from around the world and based in California. They traveled around the city with us, doing performances as we spoke with the people who stopped to watch. They had such a passion for meeting the people of London that it re-ignited my own passion.

The Notting Hill Carnival itself also felt different this year. It was quieter in some ways, and fear and anger from the Brexit and all of the terrorist attacks around the world simmered just below the festival atmosphere. We handed out promises of God on slips of paper, the same as we have in past years, and people stopped to express the longing in their hearts for a God that is bigger than what is happening in our world. A lot of people seem to feel hopeless at the course of events this year, at the violence and hatred and anger that is constantly reported in the news. They were so honest with us, and we found ourselves staying outside all day, because we wanted so much to share with them that the God that they long for is the God who Is.

I saw us shift this year. We shifted from focusing on accomplishing tasks and making things happen to truly worshipping God through all of it, which gave us a heart for speaking to as many people as we could. There were even two men who came from the Dinner Club that we hold for the homeless and needy of our area. They stayed all day and helped us build the last pieces, carry the massive animal floats that we had made, and stand guard during the times when we were out in the streets. They became a part of our family through the Notting Hill Carnival.

Now the coloured smoke is finally washing off of my shoes, and my costume t-shirt has faded in the wash, but the conversations that I had are still fresh in my mind.

So many people in London long for God. They want to rely on their minds, on their rationalism, but in their depths, they long for God.

And we long for them to encounter Him.

The drummers during evangelism in Shoreditch

Evangelism in King's Cross

Tred at work during evangelism

The whole camp before our parade through the Carnival

The men who came to help from the Dinner Club (with Ole).

Kneeling down during the parade

Letting girls drum during the parade

Guimel leading us all through the Carnival

The block party we had by the church

Praying for a man during evangelism

Handing out promises

Some of the promises that we hand out

The giant lion that we built - one of the four creatures before the Throne in Revelation

A drunk man and us cleaning up in the background

And here are some pictures of the people that we met during Carnival:

And finally, me:

a leg up

Summer is always a time of outreach for our team. We have an internship that begins in June, and we spend July and August traveling around Europe with them. This year, we spent July building a cafe at the YWAM base in Brussels and traveling to the north of Spain to visit a base that was pioneered a year ago - at the same time as ours - and is getting ready to have their first DTS. We didn't do a lot of art this summer, but rather, we supported other YWAM teams in what they needed.

I don't know how many of you are artists, but if you are, you probably recognise the predisposition of artists to focus on their own work and progress. This summer has been a season full of looking to others and seeing how we could help them. When we went to Brussels, I was painfully aware of my own inadequacy to build a cafe. But I had to face my own pride at not being good at construction and do it anyway. And in the end, our team's mix of skills and willingness to do it blessed YWAM Brussels with a new cafe space for their cafe AKA Zoe, which means "Also known as life." We spent the time sowing into conversations that will happen there, lives that will be transformed, encounters with God that will occur.

The time in Spain didn't feel like a missions outreach, because we were visiting our friends at the base that they started a year ago. The base is only a short walk from the beach, and we did Zumba evangelism most days on the beach. There are so many ways to do evangelism, and Zumba evangelism was definitely a way that I enjoyed. There was also a team of American teenagers visiting the base, and we got to show them a taste of missions life. It reminded me of being 16, when I had the whole world in front of me (I sound 56, not 26!). To be honest, I think that being 26 is easier, because I have already passed through the season of choosing a university and course of study. I have learned to listen to God's guiding in my life and that making decisions that don't make sense to others doesn't make them wrong decisions.

In late July, we came back to London and traveled south to the River Thames to stay at the Salvation Army in Chelsea. While Chelsea is perhaps the most posh area of London, the World's End estate, which is where we stayed, is not. It is a predominantly Muslim estate, and the Salvation Army just recently re-opened. It is the first time that our team has stayed in Chelsea, so we spent the weeks there preparing the ground by doing evangelism and praying in the streets and meeting children at the community centre on the estate.

Now we are back in Notting Hill, and the internship and staff have moved into the church alongside the DTS that began last week. There are over 40 of us here now, preparing for Bones Camp, our biggest outreach of the year. It will be my fifth Bones Camp and Notting Hill Carnival. I cannot believe I have been in London so long!

The cafe in Brussels before we began.

The cafe when we had finished.

Our team with YWAM Brussels

Working on the cafe

Zumba evangelism in Spain

Evangelism at a carnival in Spain

Our interns in Chelsea

Working with the Salvation Army in Chelsea

The photography DTS students