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.
