01 Sep YF Holiday 2024

Last Saturday St Mary’s and St John’s Youth Fellowship set off on our annual holiday – two minibuses full of Young People, sleeping bags, sports equipment and the odd cuddly toy.  There’s always a sense of anticipation as we set off; for about half of the 17 Youth Fellowship members on the holiday this year it was their first time away with the YF.  We have a wide age range of members, from 12-year-olds (about to join year 8 at school), through a large group of sixteen-year-olds, to two veteran 18 year olds, with ten past YF holidays between them.  And that’s the joy of the YF holiday – everyone’s in it together, looking after each other, and creating friendships which start here, and often last a lifetime.

 

The buses also boast speakers on which a compilation music selection is played at volume.  The YF playlist has been compiled over recent years based on the choices of successive groups of teenagers, and now contains over 40 hours of music.

 

The holiday is always packed with adventure.  This time, before we even got to our accommodation we’d stopped and played crazy golf, and discovered the biggest ball-pit most of us had ever seen.  Throughout the weekend we swam in the sea at Brighton, had a volleyball lesson, learned grafitti painting, raced round a huge inflatable assault course, and much, much more.

 

The holiday has its own rituals – everyone joins in ‘The Murder Game’, in which everyone is secretly given the name of another person on the holiday, a weapon and a location, and your mission throughout the holiday is to find a way to get your assigned person to take the named item from you in the correct location in order to ‘kill’ them.  People spend the whole weekend planning how to – for instance – get someone to take a piece of cheese or a pool ball from them whilst sitting on the minibus, or a table tennis bat in the kitchen.

 

 

Our accommodation was a big youth centre near Leith Hill, and many of the most special moments of the holiday take place there, outside our organised activities.  Friendships are formed over table tennis, pool, table football, or during card games or discussions between young people with different backgrounds and experiences, different schools, and different interests.  We split into groups to cook and wash-up, to organise games and for each of the activities, so everyone gets to walk, talk and work with everyone else over the course of the holiday.

 

This year’s highlights?  Well, for me, two events stood out.  Firstly, seeing the Youth Fellowship support and encourage each other as we all leapt off the 30-metre-high zip-wire platform, which shot us along 300 meters of Brighton beach.  And then, more domestically, seeing my own team cook the last night meal together – fantastic teamwork, with everyone mucking in to create great food for the whole group.

 

Asking around the YF members, though, most said their favourite time was a different one.  On the last night of the holiday, as the leaders withdrew to plan for the journey home, all 17 Young People crowded into ‘the snug’, a tiny sitting room in the youth centre with just two sofas.  Packed in, they sang, laughed and messed about, reliving the holiday late into the night.  Those moments will stay with them forever.

 

And that is what the Youth Fellowship does so wonderfully well.  It creates a support network and a framework for Young People at a critical and often challenging time in their lives.  We had an amazing four days together, and the impact will be felt for years to come.

 

The holiday takes a lot of organisation.  Four of us leaders went away with the group this time, and a huge amount of pre-work had been undertaken by Zoe Byrne to make it all happen.  We were also lucky to receive financial support from Waitrose.  We ensure that no young person misses out on the holiday for financial reasons, and the annual pantomime helps us fund the holiday, but it’s increasingly hard to make ends meet, and this sponsorship helped pay for food, and for our mini-buses.

 

If this all sounds good, and you know anyone who might be interested, St Mary’s and St John’s Youth Fellowship meets every Sunday in St Mary’s Church Hall from 7pm to 9pm, and we welcome new members aged 12 to 18.  Enquiries to Zoe at [email protected].  In September and October we will turn our eyes to the January 2025 pantomime, and we will do it with a group of young people who are energised and close-knit, having shared a wonderful and memorable long weekend away.