Making History

This has been a chock-full month, from moving into a new house (the second of the YWAM Radiant houses) to the YWAM England family gathering at a base (aka a manor house that was bought with cash decades ago by intrepid YWAMers full of faith), to beginning a new internship that leaves on outreach in a week, to England voting to leave the EU. But first things first.

In the end of May, we acquired the second YWAM Radiant base house, and I moved into it with several other staff members. Everyone came together to build the beds and assemble the furniture. With that task (mostly) completed, we all went to a manor house that doubles as a base in the countryside south of London. There we spent a weekend with our fellow YWAMers from around England, worshipping, hearing from various YWAMers on the global and national level, and spending time together. Immediately following that gathering, we welcomed nine girls from six nations to our June internship. 

Next Monday, on the 4th of July (which will never be an ordinary date for me, no matter what country I'm in), we leave on outreach to Brussels. When some of us visited the base in May, we realised that the location, mere blocks from the EU headquarters, was very strategic. We also saw so much potential in the base - which is a whole building, including a cafe and book store, in the centre of Brussels. Now, in light of last week's Referendum vote, it seems even more strategic, and we can see how God has prepared the way for us.

I don't know how the news outlets around the world have been portraying the events of last week's vote in the UK, but when Amanda, our team videographer, and I went into the streets of London on Friday with a recorder, we heard loudly and clearly how London feels. While England voted, 52% to 48%, to leave the EU, London voted to remain. 

As Amanda and I walked through Portobello Road Market the morning after, it was eerily silent. The only conversations that we heard had to do with the vote. Of everybody that we heard talking, only one person was in favour of exiting the EU. The falling of the value of the pound and the number of companies leaving England already are just the early signs of the impact of the decision. 

There is a lot of hurt in London right now, especially against Europeans and Brits. On top of all of it, there are many Europeans in our team, most of whom have jobs around the city that enable them to live here in London and to be a light in the city. We don't know what last week's vote will mean for them. Please pray for the people of this city, both British and international citizens, as we embark on this new season.

What we do know is that now is the time for the church to stand together. When we had a prayer meeting outside of Parliament on Wednesday night, the night before the vote, less than 300 Christians showed up. Nobody expected for the UK to vote Leave; even those who voted to leave didn't expect it. On Friday morning, social media showed regret from both people who had voted to remain and from people who had voted to leave. It is a time for the church to speak loudly of who God is and of what His heart is. It is the second greatest commandment for us to love our neighbour as ourselves. If God is love, that means speaking of Him to everyone that we can reach. This is an urgent time, as the UK's vote affects the rest of Europe and, subsequently, the world. It is good to be in this place at this time, and we as a team are eagerly anticipating being in London and in Europe in this season.

After over a week in Brussels, we will travel to northern Spain, where our friends have recently pioneered a YWAM base. We will help them prepare the base for the DTS that begins there in September. After that, we will return to London to do outreach here and to prepare for Bones, the Notting Hill Carnival camp that we have every August. Outreach brings its own set of challenges, from new currencies to travel expenses to full schedules to discomforts that we don't face in our houses in London. However, God also works on outreaches in ways that are hard to see from the comfort of life here. I am excited to travel around Europe in this time of unrest, to speak (and sing, and act) of His goodness, even now.

He is good. Even now, we see it.

The barista track in the cafe we built in Notting Hill Community Church

Andres doing evangelism in Camden

Worshipping in the centre of Camden

The fashion track designing a dress

Chris preaching at Hope and Anchor Community Church in Camden

Hope and Anchor Community Church (the church we planted last year in Camden)

A pretty normal picture of daily life

Springing Forward

May has been a much different month than I expected when I thought of it from the safety of January. May is always a staff season in our team, the month between internships when we have a time of holidays and prepare the beds and tracks for the new set of interns and DTS students that will join us throughout the rest of the year. We go on a staff retreat for our base and for all of YWAM England in May, as well, so it is a time of re-connecting with family that live together and also family that serve together all across this island.

But this May has been completely different.

To begin with, last week, God performed a miracle and an enormous answer to prayer, and part of the staff (including me) moved into a new house. It is only four blocks away from the All Souls house, and it has beds (and showers!) enough for our growing staff and for coming interns. The season of waiting for this house has been a long one, from the time years ago when we would walk up and down the streets of Camden together and pray for a commercial property to the nights of prayer that we had together in All Souls and in Notting Hill Community Church, our host this spring.

As with any upgrade that God gives, there have been new challenges in this season. It is the first time our whole team hasn’t lived together in one place. While the new house is beautiful, it is also a bittersweet time of learning to expand whilst retaining our sense of being a close-knit family. It means drawing together instead of stretching our wings and turning out. It means being generous and open with each other, looking to the needs of the others before our own, and generally, being the sort of Christian that Paul writes Titus about in the New Testament. And it means being vigilant against the little foxes that come into the vineyard to destroy, or the little things that can creep into our team unnoticed and destroy it. Whenever I read Titus and how passionately Paul exhorts them to let go of worldly passions, I am a bit intimidated by it, but that is exactly what God is asking of us. If we are truly going to see transformation in London, which is why we are here, we have to put God and His plans for us above our own plans.

God is teaching us all to grab more things, as well. He has put unexpected resources, jobs, and gifts into our hands, regardless of our abilities. The barista track begins with this internship, and I have watched as several of the staff girls have fought for it for a long time now. They have gone to cafes all over the city for research and inspiration, have become baristas, have researched roasters and coffee machines and all of the different elements of opening a café that I cannot begin to understand. And in two weeks, they have several girls coming to the barista track in the internship. The culmination of this was when they brought home the coffee machine, a huge, beautiful machine that they went to East London to get, this week. It has been a fight for them to start the barista track, but it is finally happening!

This Sunday is also the first birthday of Hope and Anchor Community Church, the church that our team planted in Camden last May. In the past year, Hope and Anchor transformed from a group of people meeting in the basement of a Costa to a full-fledged church that meets in a hall in the centre of Camden Town. If you’d like to follow the Facebook or Instagram, you can keep up with everything that we are up to! It is our heart for the church to embrace the people of Camden, tourists, residents, and Londoners alike, and to see many new people come to this church. But as with any church in the UK, it has been slow going. If you pray for us, please pray that Hope and Anchor Community Church would see growth in regular attendees. We also want to start reaching out to the homeless and needy in our community, for which we need resources.

As you may have gathered, we are pioneering a new base, YWAM London Radiant. I have been working on the website with our leaders, Christian and Johanna, as well as some other websites and facebook pages. I am not a website designer, nor do I code, so it has been a stretch for me. It is amazing to see the people God sends to help when I get stuck, and also to see Him fill gaps where I lack in knowledge.

I am looking forward to the internship and to working with the media and theatre tracks, which are areas that I love to work in. I am also helping to plan the International Arts Gathering, which takes place in Rome from 26-29 October and is for Christian artists to come together, to get to know each other and help each other out. If any of you are Christian artists, you should consider coming!

For the rest of you, there is Bones Camp, one of my favourite times of year. It is the 11-day camp that we have leading up to Notting Hill Carnival, the second-largest carnival in the world, which happens in the streets of Notting Hill (and right outside of Notting Hill Community Church, one of our church homes!). The camp includes preparation for the Carnival, evangelism, worship, teaching, and rehearsing different artistic areas for the parade and performances that take place during the Carnival. We all live together in Notting Hill during Bones, which you can find out more about here. It is a great activity for families, for young people, and for church groups.

We have so many exciting events and daunting challenges coming for us as a team, from the summer and autumn activities and schools to space challenges to steep financial challenges to staying united as a team that lives in two locations. We need prayer and help, as much as we can get! But we also know that the God who has brought us this far is going to be faithful to see the work that He began completed.

Now this update has grown quite long, so well done you if you’ve read it all! If you have any questions or just want to chat to me, please feel free to email me at deborahestevenson@gmail.com.

Reaching Out to London

We are doing outreach in London! For the past month, and for another month to come, the internship and some of us staff are living in churches in London and doing outreach, which we usually do somewhere else, here in our own city. It has been truly amazing to get to invest our days in this city, to sleep on floors, yes, to go to different churches, to do evangelism and go into schools and feed the homeless and participate in community festivals and do gigs in cafes.

It is Easter Week this week, and we are staying in Notting Hill Community Church. Last year, Notting Hill Community Church (NHCC) began doing an Easter art competition with some local primary schools, where the students created art pieces about Easter and exhibited them in the church. This year, we got to be involved. We went into schools and taught the students about the Christian celebration of Easter before helping them with their paintings and drawings and teaching them some songs and body percussion.

The schools that we went into had predominantly Muslim students, most of whom did not know what Easter is. It is interesting to explain Jesus rising from the dead to children who have no concept of it; most of them ended up thinking that Jesus is immortal with super powers, the ultimate Roman god/super hero crossover. One of the boys even asked, "So Jesus is a zombie?!" Admittedly, he was a little bit disappointed when he found out that being omnipotent and eternal does not mean being a zombie.

When the students came into the church this week to see the exhibition of their artwork, they had a chance to ask us questions. One of the little boys asked, "Does Jesus even appear to Muslims?" We got to explain to him that it says in the Bible that Jesus came for everyone. For those of us who are American, it was entirely odd to be able to talk about religion and Jesus to children in schools. It is something that I never thought we would get to do, but it happened nearly every day for two weeks!

We have also had two gigs in cafes, where we have performed covers and original songs. One of them was in Kahaila Cafe on Brick Lane, where Carrie and Peri work, and they manned the espresso machines for us and served us cake. I really enjoyed watching them move through the cafe with such love and confidence. The barista track begins in the summer internship, and they have carried the passion for it with them for so long that knowing that it is actually coming makes us all excited.

That, and knowing that they will be practising making coffee, which somebody has to drink!

All of this can make the outreach seem rose-coloured, but it isn't. Because we are in the city where we always live, it can be easy to fall into the patterns that we are used to. But outreach is about stretching, about going past the limits of comfort and our own understanding. The base has a financial challenge right now with the need for more space (which is a good challenge to have, admittedly!), and many of the students and staff are facing financial needs as well. We are also used to the enemies of London: isolation, the need to be completely independent, striving to be seen as the best, comfort. We are being challenged to let go of those and to walk in a new way. We are being challenged to go into the streets in the opposite spirit - to be united, to keep listening to God, to champion and serve each other.

Most of the interns who are with us now have been here since August and the DTS, and we get to watch them step out and grab this city with both hands. Yesterday, in evangelism, I watched them walk up to people boldly, confident in who they are and in the joy of Jesus that they bring with them. I watched them volunteer to clean for each other, and to do it while laughing and making jokes. They are working tirelessly, fighting for this city, fighting for the hearts here. Outreach in London is a challenge, yes, but it is also a joy. We love to fight for, and live in, this city.

Peri serving us in Kahaila Cafe.

Maddie singing in Breaking Home, our night of acoustic music at Kahaila Cafe.

Ina helping year 3 with their art.

Eric praying for a man on drugs in Soho.

Our friends, old and new, who came out to Breaking Home at BRT Vinyl Cafe on Portobello Road.

Moa and Andrina on stilts at a community festival in Willesden Green.

Carrissa serving food at a homeless lunch.

Hope and Anchor

Walking with intention changes places.

It changes atmospheres, and it changes hearts.

When God spoke to Christian, our team leader, about Camden, Christian started walking the land.

That was seven years ago, and we have been walking there with him ever since. For seven years, he and Johanna have invested in the ground of Camden. They have walked it faithfully. They have spoken to shop keepers, workers in the market, residents of Camden, tourists snapping photos with no idea of where they are, the homeless sitting outside the pubs, and everybody in between. They have prayed for God to open doors for us to move to Camden, and more recently, for us to start a church in Camden.

Last May, we started meeting for church in Camden. Our whole team, along with some other Christians from the area, met in basements of coffee shops, because we saw the need for a church in Camden, one of the cultural centres of London, and therefore, the UK (see a post about it here). We saw the witchcraft present in the area, the paganism, the worship of materialism and self-destruction through drugs, and we knew that God should be there. So we started coming to worship in a place where our bit of light would be a dramatic difference to the resident darkness.

And on Sunday, we unlocked the doors to the Upper Room, a space we are renting in the centre of Camden, and we held the first meeting of Hope and Anchor Community Church. It was mainly our team, with a few others, who met. But we got to worship God loudly without worrying about disturbing coffee shop patrons. We set up tea, coffee, and biscuits, we greeted at the door, we saw a friend who came to Christ in Trafalgar Square last summer come up the stairs to join us. And we saw the fruit of a dream that was planted seven years ago.

We still have many dreams for Camden. Dreams of living there, of running schools there, of having a coffee shop, of filling it with crazy Christians from dozens of nations. But this is a step, the fulfillment of a part of the promise. It is another whisper of God's faithfulness, another reason to celebrate a God whose timing is perfect, even if we cannot comprehend it (even if it frustrates us to no end). 

There is a difference between stubbornness and conviction, as Christian spoke about in the church meeting on Sunday. And when you have conviction, you will walk the land. For seven years, when you want to move now, and now, and now, you will continue to walk the land. 

And we will keep walking the land until we can call it home.

Touching Down

I am in the States for a few days on the way back from Puerto Rico, visiting my family for a bit before heading back to London and the winter internship. I had the opportunity to speak at my parents' church in Savannah this morning and to meet some of the people who have been praying for and supporting me for the past few years. It is always a blessing for me to remember that there are people around the world who pray for my team and for me, and we have certainly seen the power of those prayers in different situations in the past years.

For the last week of our time in Puerto Rico, we had a pre-Sanse (Fiesta de la Calles de San Sebastian, or the street party on the streets around San Sebastian in San Juan's Old Town) camp with Christians from the area, and then we all went to Sanse. We got to participate in the parade before we set ourselves up on the Plaza of San Jose, where we did drumming, dances, stilts, fire pois, fire breathing, and live painting. All of this drew a crowd to whom we got to speak about Jesus.

One of my favourite parts of the festival was seeing the way the Puerto Ricans came to parties with their musical instruments. They brought drums, guiros, and one guy even brought a trumpet. He played the trumpet one-handed so that he could hold his beer in his other hand. They joined in the music and dancing wherever they were, and more often than not, they started speaking to me before I spoke to them! They even waded through my Spanish with me in order to talk to me, and I got to know a lot about their lives and the beautiful island on which they live.

Now I am with my family, and it is odd to open my mouth and to not have people look at me. I understand what signs say, and I can buy my favourite foods at the grocery store. And while I love being home, I also look forward to returning to London and to the winter internship. It is good to live the unconventional life that God called me to, in a house with people of sixteen nations and nearly as many art styles, and to serve God together.

For everyone who is just joining this journey, there are a few links that may help you out. The first one is here, a step-by-step guide to supporting me on Paypal. The second is my email address, which is deborahestevenson@gmail.com. If you are looking for the Facebook of my team, you can find it by typing in "Londons Arts" (be careful to get the "s" on "London!")

open eyes, open hands

Today marks three weeks of being in Puerto Rico, of traveling the island in our four-van caravan, of visiting churches, schools, rehabilitation centers, public parks and squares, and even the beach and the rain forest!

One of the things that God has been teaching me while I have been here is to open my eyes to see the beautiful things that He is putting in each of my days. We are on outreach, which means that we are prepared to give up the comforts of our lives in London. However, the people of Puerto Rico have such generous hearts that they keep taking care of us in unexpected ways, whether it is through donations of clothing and flip flops or through feeding all thirty of us the traditional Puerto Rican meal of chicken or pork, rice, and beans. 

Puerto Ricans also love to get to know new people. Even as I was just in the queue at Starbucks, a man read the name on my cup and starting asking what I was doing and telling me about his life as a chef on the other side of the island. Evangelism is much different than it is in London, because people love to stop and chat for a while, and we leave with new friends. When we spent a week at a church in Caguas, a city near San Juan, the people of the church all came around to check on us and make sure that we had everything that we needed. The women all wanted the chance to cook for us, and they were upset when they didn't have a turn!

This is a culture of extremes, and while a lot of the people here go to church on Sundays, they often do not carry that into their weekday lives. It is heavy on our hearts to inspire the people of Puerto Rico to commit to Christ, to fall in love with Him and to pursue Him with their lives, rather than to go to church on Sunday and live the rest of their weeks in their own ways. Puerto Ricans have passion and perseverance that we desperately need in this battle that we fight to bring God's Kingdom to Earth. I believe that, as God stirs more of their hearts, and as we pray for them to commit their lives to Him and what He calls them to, we will see more Puerto Ricans being sent to bring nations back to the feet of the King.

There is only one more day left in 2015, and I am so glad that I will get to spend it here, looking back on the miracles that God has done, on the places that He has led our team to visit, on the ways that He has provided unexpectedly, and on the challenges that He has led us through. And I look forward to spending 2016 doing the same: meeting new people, traveling to different places, and following God.

 The musicians and drummers singing worship songs on the streets of Bayamon.

 Luis, a man that I spoke to for a long time in Bayamon. He sees evidence of God in creation and captures it in words.

A little girl in a school in Caguas who didn't want to dance, but was keen to learn photography instead.

 Christian speaking at a church in Carolina.

 The dancers and musicians at a Christmas festival in Cayey.

 The ferry from Culebra, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico.

Old San Juan

across the waters

Early tomorrow morning, we leave for Puerto Rico. It has been a week of packing, preparing our arts, and tying up the loose ends that come from putting our London lives on hold for six weeks so that we can go and give everything that we have in Puerto Rico.

This outreach will be six weeks of using arts to reach people for Jesus, whether those arts are in the streets, in churches, or in schools. I do not have a full picture yet of what it looks like, but I am excited to see God use us in the lives of non-Christians and Christians alike. I've also heard of the incredible warmth and generosity of Puerto Ricans, and after living for over three years with a team leader who is Puerto Rican, I am looking forward to seeing his homeland.

A week ago, we had an exhibition in Notting Hill that gave us a chance to show our community what we have been creating over the past three and a half months. There were live music and dancing as well as fashion, visual arts, and photography on display. We had a lot of people come who have encountered us in these past months, whether through the homeless dinner club that we run out of the church, or through various evangelism events (or just through us living our lives in our neighbourhood) around the city.

It is always odd to pause everything to go on outreach, but at the same time, it still amazes me that God gives us the opportunity to travel around the world for Him. We get to live in so many different cultures that I never dreamt of experiencing for myself. And while I am excited to be in dollars again and to go to shops that I grew up with, I also know that Puerto Rico, my first Caribbean experience, will be different from anywhere I've gone before. I believe that God has special things in store for this outreach - encounters with people who will bless me, and people whose lives I will hopefully get to speak into, seeing His hand across the island, and seeing our discipleship training students reach out to invest what they've learned in this time.

And as usual, I expect to have lots of photographs and videos to show you when I return!

Carrie, our photography students, and me

Our photographs on display

Erin explaining some of the artwork to some of our friends

A discussion over a tree that one of the students sculpted.

The dancers performing

The guys performing a cover from Mumford and Sons