Blog

I’m so far from perfect, and I had a steep learning curve with some new situations that I didn’t handle perfectly these past few weeks, but I also had an incredible moment on Friday night where the Holy Spirit showed up in power and beauty.

Generally, I try to have a half hour of calm before my leader prayer time on Friday nights, but I had squeezed in a meeting with another ministry leader in the area just before – which was a fantastic connection as I quickly discovered this guy is a TCK who grew up in Hong Kong and works for a ministry that supports youth groups with events designed to encourage young people to share the Gospel with peers. Cool stuff. We ended our meeting with Lance praying for me and my Friday gathering as I went to meet the YWAM team (which turned out to have three members from the PNW – one from Spokane, one from just outside of Salem, and one from TUALATIN) who I’d invited to run a portion of our programme. Some distractions came up almost immediately as our leaders arrived for prayer, and I wondered for the third time if something big was up. The previous two Fridays when I’ve had a sense of “God is moving in a big way tonight,” we had crazy cool opportunity that was disrupted by what would be termed in Christianese as some serious spiritual warfare.

Well, this week we had a glimpse of what breakthrough could look like. As our alumni young adults were guest leading a worship set, you could feel the vibe of the room was different than normal. Matt came up to me a couple songs in and said he had a sense we should pray for healing. I was all in, and he got on stage and had one of our youth leaders share a story from Easter Camp of his sister being miraculously healed from a leg injury. He’d told me that night, and I had watched the girl carry her crutches out of Big Top without even a limp. As Matt reminded us all that the same God was in our church right then, he asked people to raise their hands if they had something that needed healing and instructed others to move and pray for those raised hands as they felt led.

Obviously my hand was high in the air, and I was surrounded pretty quickly. One of the younger boys in our youth group came up to me right away and prayed over me; another boy in his small group who just gave his life to Jesus at Easter Camp followed soon after. I sat there with tears in my eyes as leaders and youth prayed over me asking God to miraculously heal me and bring glory to his name. All around the room people were being prayed over, and you could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit moving through that space.

After we listened to a message from one of our visitors, I considered just having us stay in that holy space together to keep praying, but I chose to send each small group to spend a few minutes praying in the smaller groups and asking God for more of his presence. I went with the year 13 girls, and I asked them if any of them were hearing God say something in that moment. One of the girls spoke up about being struck by the sense of how big God is. Unbeknownst to her, I’d sat next to her mom at a seminar last week on the majesty of God and have been seeing this topic crop up in conversations all week. Our God is so big; he is earth splitting, ocean parting, fire sending, resurrection big. Another girl brought up Psalm 8, and we spent a few minutes reading it and praising God for his creativity and bigness.

We gathered back for notices at the end of the night, and I encouraged my youth to invite their friends along for youth group next week and to bring non-Christian friends to hear the story of Jesus through our church presentation of the Mark Drama, a dramatic production of the Gospel of Mark. Then I took a bite of a Carolina Reaper (because I am the kind of youth pastor who will do this and get a mullet on stage just because a teenager asked me to) and dismissed the group for the week. As parents were picking up kids and we were saying our goodbyes, one of the boys who’d prayed for me came over to me with his dad and his sister. He was reflecting that his experience that night was just like how God moved at Easter Camp. He’d watched as another youth had been moved to pray and felt the power of the Holy Spirit in the laying of hands on another person. “That’s how I felt when I prayed for you,” he told me, “And I really hope God heals you.” This is the kind of moment I moved to New Zealand for: watching young people encounter God and step out in faith in beautiful and bold ways. As he and his sister kept talking about how cool this night was, one said, “Tonight felt like a mini Big Top.”

This captures everything.

The God of the big moments of Easter Camp Big Top sessions was meeting kids at my Friday night programme, and this is one thousand percent the goal of Easter Camp. One of the key things that sets EC apart from events like Creation Fest or even Aquire the Fire is that you have to go with a youth group – this event is so discipleship and relationship orientated that they require young people to have a pastoral connection with a church to even attend. Their heart and passion is to make space for the Holy Spirit to show up in profound and beautiful ways during Easter Week so that young people can encounter and grow in purposeful, discipled relationship with God at their youth groups. EC isn’t about a one off spiritual high; it’s about encountering God in a new space so that you can recognise him in your home space. It’s about transforming young people into more mature Jesus followers through these purposeful and powerful God encounters.

I am elated to hear my young people make this connection that this week youth group was like a mini Big Top – because that means we can do it again and again. We can keep making space for God to show up, and we can keep seeking his presence, and we can keep fanning this revival spark into flame.

I told you all EC24 was one for the history books. As I sat in that space several weeks ago, I knew it was the start of a movement. Friday night still felt like the prologue to what God is doing in this city, and I can’t wait to see what next week brings.