The Olympics: an opportunity for mission

Junior arrived in the UK in February to be part of The Nottingham YfC team. As part of his year he went down to London during the olympics to be part of the mission team in Newham. Here are his thoughts of the whole experience:

The project idea came from the local YFC team and from the National YFC willing to explore the unique Olympics time opportunity to spread the gospel to people from all parts of the world. Love E7 was a ten days evangelistic program in Newham running from the 24^th of July until the 2^nd of August during the Olympics time aiming to bless the community. Just to explain quickly the clever idea of the project’s name, E7 is the post code for place that we’d be join in, so the name Love E7 came from the idea of loving Newham and blessing that community.

I’ve heard about this opportunity from National YFC and I got really interested in serving God and help making a difference in Newham. Because I was at holidays and I hadn’t got anything planned for that time, I thought being part of it would be a great experience and a time to grow up in my faith. So I accepted the invite!

To help in Love E7 we’d got around sixty people, mainly youth, from the local community, from different parts of England and from other countries as well. Including myself, I think the Brazilian group was about 21 people, most of them couldn’t speak English at all! We’d got around 10 people from France and about the same quantity from Holland, but the Dutch people arrived just on Saturday the 28^th. One funny story that happened was that the staff team asked me if I could pick the Brazilians up and the French group using the underground trains. I thought would be easier to pick the Brazilians up from Heathrow than the French from a nearer station because of my issue with English language but I got a bigger issue with the Brazilian baggage. Each one of them was carrying 2 big suitcases and the journey from Heathrow to Forest Gate in Newham was 2 hours long, so it was really difficult! I lost them once on the underground, everybody got in the train and I couldn’t because I was helping to put the baggage in the train, so funny! But it ended up well, everyone got safe to Forest Gate station.

Talking about how we were acting, the staff team allocated all those people into teams of 7-8 people, so we’ve got 8 teams there, each one of them responsible for doing different activities in Newham that were; gardening, painting a bridge, street evangelism, litter picking, youth and kids clubs, sports day, dancing and drama on the streets. During the days, in every morning we were gathering together in one of the churches for a time of worship, prayer and training and then we were starting our activities in the community after lunch time. Thinking specifically about my own team, we were responsible for help running a kids club at one of the churches in Newham, and an Asian Youth Centre.

The experience helping in the kids club for 2-8 aged kids was amazing! The theme was the Olympics and every child was considered as an athlete. Everyone in the team had a responsibility and because I was a leader assistant on my team my responsibility was support the other four Brazilians in my team because of the language issue, doing the warm up at the beginning and giving out points for children who were behaving well or that did something really good during the activities. I was the first aider in our team as well, so I was responsible for safe and security as well. Through the days that we helped there we could enjoy our time doing dancing songs, face painting, bible verse’s games, bouncy castle, drawing, telling bible stories and more. At the end we summed the team’s points and we gave rewards for the winner team. I really enjoyed spending time with the children, I think it’s because I love playing with kids, they always make me laugh and it’s always fun. I would say that our impact in there was really positive, everyone was doing their best to make it good and I’m sure that the kids there could see how we can enjoy the life with God.

At the Asian Youth Centre, the aim was more about advertising than helping with the activities, so we were trying to take people’s attention to what was going on the place. Because the Brazilians on our team were part of a dance group, we thought would be good to use this skills to bring people’s attention. So we basically had the Brazilians dancing outside while the others were trying to talk with people and invite them to come along and enjoy the time in the Centre. It was a really good time, lots of people were stopping to watch the dancing and we had the opportunity to talk with those people and share our faith with them, even knowing that could be difficult because they were mainly Muslims.

If I would like to define what Love E7 was for me, I’d say that the program’s name really made sense, that I loved that community and I loved to be part of this amazing initiative and it definitely influenced my life and relationship with God. I feel more capable to share my faith with other people than I was before and I’m sure that it will influence positively in my youth work in Nottingham. If I have the opportunity to do this again, I wouldn’t think twice, I strongly recommend this kind of activity to anyone who wants to serve God and to spend time being used by Him.

If you would like to know more about the feedback that we’ve got from all the places that we helped with, there’s a video of Love E7 on youtube where you can hear more about it, just type in ‘Love E7’ on youtube and you’ll be able to see God’s action through us in Newham.

Junior Bittencourt