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Post In Youth Articles
Added by Andi Topping on Friday 26th September 2008
No matter where you look, what you watch, read or listen to it is pretty hard to escape the celebrity culture we now live in. However, that was one of the challenges our young people were asked to consider during their annual youth weekend in Castlewellan.
More than 90 young people and youth leaders attended the event in March which had “Living Life to the Full” as its theme. The guest speaker was Methodist Minister Jools Hamilton.
Seventeen-year-old Katharine Calvert said the weekend was one of the best she’s been on because of the number of sessions and the opportunities to deepen friendships.
“There were sessions each day with several to choose from on the Saturday morning, so rather than the focus being mainly on having fun and enjoying yourself it was much more faith-based.
“I really enjoyed the talk about the negative impact the media can have on your faith. So many magazines aimed at teenagers and young women are all about how you look, diets, clothes and sex. I decided sometime ago to stop reading and looking at the likes of Hello or Cosmo so it was great for me to have that decision reinforced and also for other young people, men and women, to realise how wrong and inappropriate the messages are in lots of these magazines,” Katharine explained.
“The talk given by Jools Hamilton on the importance of the Bible was also great. He made us realise that reading God’s word everyday and spending time with God can have a huge impact on your faith and growth. Since the weekend I’ve increased the time I spend in prayer and studying the Bible and have seen real benefits. You want your life to be God-focused and to put Him first in everything.
“The weekend also gave me the chance to deepen my friendships with the other girls in my small group. Very often we don’t socialise with each other outside church, as we have other friendship groups, but by spending time together I realised how much we enjoyed each others company and what a great group of girls they are,” she added.
As well as the sessions there was a battle of the sexes on Saturday that was in a famous couples or buddies fancy theme and then the young people were challenged to raise £15 each to help build a house for someone in the developing world. The Habitat for Humanity Hope Builders project challenges individuals and churches to raise a total of £1235 to change someone’s life by buying them a home.
In this blog, Jools Hamilton wrote this about the weekend: “I really enjoyed my time with the Knock people. They were well behaved, good fun, organised and open to what God was going to say.”
