And the winner is....Alan Taylor from Ivy Manchester.
His fantastic student mission story is below. He has won the FireBible and £15 Starbucks vouchers. But he decided to add £10 to the card and pay it forward so the competition rolls on. So I now want more great student mission stories and you will win a FireBible and £25 Starbucks voucher! Email me on luke@fusion.uk.com with your story.
Five of us were out in a student area of Manchester during the Friday of fresher's week. The place was absolutely packed with hundreds of students walking the streets from pub to pub, queueing up outside vodka bars, ordering their kebabs. It was 1130pm and we were setting up for our 'midnight mass' on the streets outside a local Tesco car park. We came to the fusion conference earlier that month and were totally grabbed by the idea of doing communion at midnight. We're not catholics but we can see that bread and wine is still so recognisable to most people and a proclamation of the gospel of grace (1 Cor 11:26). Midnight is such a great time to be out on the streets with hundreds of students out, so we thought we'd have a go.
We set up a gazebo, a table of bread and wine, a wooden cross, a ridiculously high pole with a banner for healing, our churchinaclub banners and more! You could not miss us! We chatted with dozens throughout the night, prayed, blessed, shared communion with them. A couple of us spent an hour with a guy who was so drunk an ambulance had to be called. His friends were visibly moved by our care for him, hopefully a sign to them all of God's love. The manager of a local vodka bar came out to chat with us, police looked on approvingly and bouncers told us to call them if there was any trouble. Mass means 'dismissal', we felt that God wanted us to experience grace in bread and wine and then dismiss us or tell us to 'go!' So after mass we gave out hundreds of bottles of water to the students.
Throughout the night we met people identifying them self as a catholic, a protestant or an orthodox Christian. All of the people we spoke to had little or no Christian community but recognised the need for the grace seen in taking bread and wine. We hope to continue with midnight mass and call people to recommit their life to God through enjoying forgiveness as well as a belong to a body of believers. That's what I call missional mass.
