Re-cap

Hi All,

It's Jason once again, keeping you up to date with the interns' wheelings and dealings. Ultimately, we're looking to keep this blog fresh and regular. Clearly we've struggled to find the time to post over the past 3 weeks or so - this has been on account of a number of reasons, principally relating to our extraordinarily busy schedules individually and corporately. (You should see the our collective Google Calendar!) In any case, we have to do better and will strive to post weekly!

In the course of our introduction to being interns, we've had teaching sessions with Mark (Crawford) initially being shown the ropes (16/9), one session that I led on the mission of God (23/9) followed by sessions on time management (30/9) and mentoring (7/10). I think I can speak for all of the interns when I say that the sessions have been particularly useful and challenging to our thinking and practice as staff within the church. I think that for myself, personally, managing my time in a constructive fashion which makes room for both the tasks I need to do and the rest I need to function is an on-going battle and the teaching session has given me a lot to reflect on!

In terms of roles and responsibilities, we all have roles specific to ourselves as individuals. I won't "steal the thunder" of other interns, I'll let them share what roles they have and groups they're involved in. My roles range from co-ordinating Fusion, our Sunday evening work with 9-13 year olds. This term, we're looking at the grass-roots of Christianity, using games, drawing and discussion to explore topics such as, What is a Christian? What is Church? Why Pray? etc. In a session which I led with Iman (Djalloul) we looked at the church, played some ice-breakers to learn each others' names and laugh, drew/wrote what our idea of what church was, had a treasure hunt for puzzle pieces of a (paper) outline of a body and discussed what life would be like if parts of the body were missing, and how important it is for every member to be present! (Thanks to Rob for drawing around me on the previous Friday with the biggest marker pen ever!)

I'm also involved in the worship band on Sundays (so far, electric guitar and percussion), planning for development of our resources, planning for overseas mission, community work at the Durham Avenue estate, leading sessions of the Speakers' Corner stream of re:think and also I've been asked to speak at Trinity (Romford) for an all age service, which was a thoroughly new experience for me as I'm not easily coerced into speaking in public! Still, with new work comes new challenges, and I've been able to see how much God has his hand on the work we do, and how, when we're willing to listen to Him (a theme picked up on in re:think 2 weeks ago when we had visiting speakers, The Oliver's focussing on (peer) mentoring) and to be changed by His Spirit more into the likeness of Jesus.

In terms of prayer, we'd appreciate the following:

• Time management - that we'd have the wisdom to manage our time effectively and get the balance between all the things we have to do, right
• Energy - related to the above, we all have hectic schedules and really need God's strength to do the jobs we have
• Peace - to know the truth of Philippians 4:7 and 13 in our lives, God's peace about the work and the means to carry it out

I'm personally very excited about what we're going to see God do through his people here, and the potential that there is for (more) lives to be changed by his work here.

Anyway, I've said more than enough for right now!

God bless,

Jason.