The service at Surrey Chapel was lead by Josh Walsh, one of our player managers and former Surrey Chapel member. The entire service was lead by or involved one person from our team, with Josh Kimball giving a short message to the children, Paul Gilbert, and James Jaagard (our other player manager) both doing Q&A's with Walshy. It was a good service for us to be able to continue to grow our connection with the church and help them have a better understanding of what our sport ministry entailed. In the afternoon half of us met at a local park to host a small-sided footy tournament for about 25 to 30 kids. Six showed up to play football, and only two of those six knew it had something to do with the local church. So most of us played with the kids that were there, and a couple of us played basketball with another group that just happened to come out while we were there. After everything began to wind down, we were able to share the gospel with both sets of kids. Our last event of the day was to attend the church that tried to arrange the tournament that afternoon. In the youth group session after the service, called CYFA, our player managers, James and Josh, had a Q&A session with the youth pastor. It was a good time for it as well because a U-18 side was there that evening to get their trophies for their season, so they got a chance to ask questions about what we were doing. It took a while for it to get going, but they got into it after a while.
Monday saw us travel up to Buxton (about 3 and a half hours) for our last stop before returning to the Wirral. Due to one of our cars overheating , forcing us to have to take a short break, we arrived just in time to start warming up for our match. The team was a church team that played in a competitive league in Buxton, and are the best team we have played to date (mainly because they actually tried to attack). It finished 9-1, but we played better because we were being pushed, so it looks a bit lopsided. On Tuesday our team split up between three different schools to do some ministry. Five of us, including myself, were placed at a primary school, working with kids ages 8 to 12. During a given teacher's planning period, they brought out their class (roughly 30 students) to us and we played some football games with them, such as "sharks and minnows" and the "gauntlet" (or so we called it). In all we had four different session, each lasting about one hour. We shared the gospel with each class at the end of the sessions. What surprised me was that the teachers and the administrator who worked with us were able to hear everything we said, and did not give us any problems. In the States I do not think we would have been able to be as explicit as we were to those students. It is probably our best ministry opportunity to date, primarily because it went well and the pastor who arranged us being there will be able to work with those schools again in the future.
The day in the school was our last ministry for the tour and we returned home that evening, which was greatly welcomed. We will not be taking any more ministry tours this summer as we begin to refocus on training and the upcoming season. We will be taking a week to go to a Christian conference in Keswick, which I think will be a week from this coming Monday. If there is anything in particular you would like to know or hear about, do not hesitate to tell me as I could use help on making these posts a bit less boring.
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