Campus Breakout

Campus Breakout is a massive part of the student work at our church, one that hopefully you’re all au fait with now. It has been such a privilege to see God starting to move powerfully through these times and we’re expectant for more. The last couple of weeks especially have been so exciting and we wanted to make sure you all get the chance to hear about them. We want you guys to know, too, that Breakout isn’t just for a certain group of people, it’s for everyone – each and every one of us can be used be God! We all come with exactly the same credentials – inadequate beings who, by grace, have been given the keys to the kingdom of God! So have a read, and be inspired to joini us one afternoon if you can…

Treasure Hunting

On Wednesday this week we went out Treasure Hunting. It felt like a little while since the last one, but, as ever, God showed up massively and did some cool stuff. Here’s but a taster:
“…When we caught up to him, we asked him what had happened and he explained to us that he’s hurt his ankle and that, despite being on a load of painkillers, his ankle still hurt and it felt like a 3/10. We showed him our maps and we had headphones, pain in foot and his name, Steven. He was a bit freaked out, but let us pray for him….“

You can read the whole story right here.

‘Buckets of Love’

The Wednesday prior to this we went round campus and simply gave out some encouraging notes, sharing God’s heart with people. This idea is so simple, but its amazing just how God can move through it…
“…Then as we got close to Kro, we saw a guy on crutches (fair game). Naturally, I used the bucket as an in and casually asked if I could pray for his knee, which he’d just had surgery on. He said it was at a 5/10. After the first time, it went down to a 3/10. Prayed again and it went down to a 0. The pain was fully gone and full flex was nearly restored to his knee. He felt a slight twinge when he tried to bend it fully, but the pain was gone!…“.

Again, you can read the whole story over right here, on the testimony section of the prayer blog.

It’s so important to celebrate as a family what God is doing in our city, to thank him, and to ask him for more! Hopefully these stories will build your faith as well, and encourage you to come along and get involved. Honestly, all God asks of us is that we are available – he does the rest! So why not come join us this Wednesday, or any other during the rest of term?…

 

Catch-up

Hello again from the Vinelife Student Blog! Sorry it’s been a quiet few weeks on here recently – hopefully you’ve all been enjoying scouring through the backlog of articles and recommendations. If you haven’t, you really should – there’s some great stuff to access.

We’ve had a really exciting start to the term student-wise. Campus Breakouts (every Wednesday, 2pm) have been a lot of fun. Just last week we went out and did “Buckets of Love”, where we simply shared encouraging words from God with people, and the Lord was up to some cool stuff. Even before we went out, a guy approached us in KroBar and we ended up chatting with him for ages; encouraging him in his current struggles, praying for him, and sharing God’s truth about his life with him. It was awesome to see just how much the Holy Spirit was obviously impacting him – and especially awesome considering he found us… it’s a lot easier that way! Then when we out and about, we saw a number of people get healed including one guy whose knee got completely better. Awesome.

We had our Student Alpha Launch last week as well – Week One, “Who is Jesus?” is happening this week at 7.30pm in Happiness Café. It’s not too late to invite your friends, so get on that!

Finally, RSS (Reach Saturday Studies) started back with a bang this past weekend. RSS is our fortnightly time to get together and delve deeper into God’s word. It’s led by Chris Foster, a PhD student from Nazarene Theological College, and is just generally fantastic. Every other Saturday (next one is 30th October), 10am, Manchester Academy. Well worth a couple of hours of your time!

In the mean time, I’m just about to release something very exciting into cyberspace: Staff Intern Jess Felstead’s first post on the Student Blog. Stay tuned, it’ll be here this afternoon!

God Lands in Disneyland

Videos!

So it’s Breakout Sunday this weekend, where we’re going out Treasure Hunting as a family after the Vinelife morning service. We’ve really started to see God move a lot during various treasure hunts, but just to whet your spiritual appetites a little more, here are some incredible videos from when a few guys from Bethel hit Disneyland with the love of Jesus. Incredible stuff.

Here are the links to the other three parts:

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Awesome, huh?!

Welcome Week Update – Part Two

Everybody has to read this.

Yesterday was ‘Buckets of Love’. We didn’t really know what was going to happen, just a case of seeing what God was up to really. So, having spent about an hour in Starbucks writing loads of encouraging words, scriptures and prophecies, we hit the streets if Fallowfield to go give them out. Most people just took them without saying anything, but the ones who did were visibly blessed and encouraged, which is always a good thing. There was one particular guy we got to chat to about forgiveness and faith and stuff. He was well up for us praying for him, and as we did I started shaking – a new experience for me. We totally should have and chatted longer about what was going on with him, a lesson for next time!

On to Treasure Hunting… There’s loads of stories to put up but I’ll just do a few – hopefully we’ll do a bumper edition with extra detail at some point soon. Suffice to say, God did lots of cool stuff!

First off, Vanessa bumped into a guy we met on Monday a couple of nights back who instantly recognised her and got chatting with her about we had been doing and about what it meant to be a child of God. The hunt for treasure never stops!!

Today… Our team had swelled to 14, including a few first-timers, and we had a bit of fun getting filled with the spirit next to this lady on a bench. The most exciting story was from Golibe’s team. I can’t remember the specifics (will update when I get testimonies sent in) but basically they got chatting to this guy on crutches and his friend. The pain was in his hip and he described it as a ’10′ on the pain scale. After praying a couple if times it was completely healed! Golibé & steve shared some words with the guy, one of which was about it being a ‘new day’. Funnily enough he’d woken up that day and said to himself that he wanted a fresh start. Simon and Iona then came over to join them and having no knowledge of what was going on, Iona shared this word with the guy…’fresh start’. Amazing. God’s so funny!!

As you can imagine the guy was blown away and, aside from being unsure of what to do with his now redundant crutch, was well up for coming along to church. Praise God!

Finally, one of my clues was ‘camouflage’ so we stopped to chat to the guys on the paintball stand outside the SU. It turned out that one of the guys suffered from back spasms and well up for me praying for him (I didn’t even notice that ‘back pain’ was one of my clues!). There was no pain at that moment so he couldn’t tell if he’d been healed, but he was dead encouraged and the word I had for him about his friends seemed to really hit home.

Like I said, there were loads of other stories like that from all the teams, but hopefully that’s enough to get a flavour of what God’s been up to! Exciting times!! This is just the tip of the iceberg, we’re hungry for so much more!

Keep praying and join us tomorrow from 10am for 60 Minutes, flyering, and who else knows what God has in store for us!

Welcome Week Update – Part One

And we’re off! We had the first reach of term this past Sunday and our Campus Breakout kicked off with a bang yesterday.

A group of us gathered to pray in the morning, wandering around the campus releasing God’s presence and making declarations against strongholds of the enemy. It was a great time, and you can join us as we do so again on Thursday and Friday of this week (10am, UMSU steps).

We also went out Treasure Hunting in the afternoon and had an absolute blast! What was particularly great was being joined by people from 2 or 3 different churches – so good to stand side-by-side doing God’s work. Anyway, lots of fun stuff happened out on the hunt – we chatted to loads of people, prayed and prophesied over most of them, saw God bring some healing and just generally shared the love and joy of Jesus wherever we went. We prophesied over a man dressed as a cow, chatted with a lepracaun and even asked God to give one guy a free bus pass – fresher’s week is crazy!!

My personal favourite encounter was with one particular guy called Will. He and his mate was dressed in ‘horrow show’ clothes and make-up, so I thought they’d be up for a chat! One of the first things Will said was that he didn’t believe God had a plan for his life, and that sometimes he did believe n God but that the many negative experiences in his life had made him doubt. We chatted a bit more and it turned out he suffered from a number of different pains and conditions – a couple of which were clues on our maps (‘neck’ and ‘shoulder’ pain). He was happy to let us pray for him, and after two or three little prayers he said that his neck/shoulders did feel better. Vanessa then gave him a word of encouragement about how God sees him, prompting the response: “are you a medium?”!! You could totally tell that he’s had some sort of encounter. The great thing was, when we met back up to debreif it turned out that another team had met him as well and he’d shared how he’d be encouraged. I love it! There were lots of other cool stories too, ask me about them! Or better still, come out with us on Thursday!

Before then however, you can get involved with ‘Buckets of Love‘ – tomorrow, 11am, Fallowfield Starbucks. We’re going to fill a load of buckets full of prophetic words, scriptures, generally encouraging words that God wants to say over people and then just hit the streets and share. It’s going to be so much, and I’m sure God will set up lots of cool encounters. Make sure you come along!!

All the details of our Welcome Week plans are on our facebook page.

Excellent. Keep praying and keep sharing Jesus with people whenever you get the chance – it’s gonna change the world!

P.S. – If you were there on Sunday you’d have heard about how we teamed up with CCM:City on Sunday night – you can read a little thank you from Tim right here. Winner.

Miracles at School

God can do some incredible things through us if we just make ourselves available to him.

Check out the story of this guy, Owen Braaksma. He decided to start stepping out at school and praying for people…it’s incredible. And he’s 15!! Amazing. We can probably all learn something about faith from him, but more than that be encouraged about how God can move and reveal himself by intervening in people’s lives.

Jesus healed a guy’s back today!

Birthday Blessings:

So we’ve just been out treasure hunting and it was awesome. Here’s one of the stories…

Having ended up in Fallowfield on the back of a few clues relating to Trof, Dan and I started to meander up the street towards Owens Park.  Chris, Jez and Joel had gone the other way but soon called us to let us know that some of our treasure might be approaching – it was a guy wearing a brown leather jacket (Dan had “brown leather jacket” while I had just “leather”.) Dan started to chat to the guy and showed him the treasure map. After initially seeming a little cautious about the whole thing he suddenly became more interested and started to pore over both our treasure maps, looking for stuff that was relevant to him.

After chatting briefly he let on that he had a really bad lower-back problem that was causing restriction in his movement so we immediately offered to pray for him. Dan explained that God could heal his back and pray that He would bring complete restoration – even resetting vertebrae. While we were praying we both had a great sense of the Holy Spirit and you could he was moving on Zanko (sp.!) as well. After a short prayer, Dan asked him to test it and Zanko found that he could reach over to his side and bend over towards his toes – both things he couldn’t do before! At this point we were all getting really excited! I asked if he wanted to experience more of God, so I prayed for that.

The next part was really cool. he started walking us up and down the street to introduce us to people he knew, to let them know what we were doing. His whole demeanour was just really happy – it was so encouraging. He was telling people that we’d made him happy.

And you know what? It was Zanko’s birthday… he got a present from Jesus!

God is awesome. He just loves to bless people.

Lift off!

So we had the Student Alpha launch night last night… it was great! Loads of people came, the entertainment was awesome and hopefully many people left with the intention of coming back next week for the start of the real thing. Thank you so much to everyone who prayed/invited/helped/well-wished – please continue to do so for the duration of the course, we really need all your support. And just so you know – week 1 kicks of Wednesday 21st October, 7.30pm at Jabez Clegg. Free food and everything!

Another thing that’s really beginning to “take off” (i’m sorry.) are the student treasure hunts that we’ve been doing for the past few weeks. We were out again yesterday afternoon and it’s really exciting to see everyone’s confidence growing a bit more. But it’s not actually about us, it’s about seeing people encounter the love of God, which is why the most encouragement always comes from the people we get to chat and pray with. Once more we uncovered some more of God’s treasure (whether they knew they were or not!) and it was awesome to be able to pray with a number of people – the appointments that God sets up are just mind-blowing sometimes. Right now we’re still fighting with our natural urge to run away from most encounters that start up as soon as we can, but gradually we’re learning to have more faith and stick around a bit longer to see what God’s up to!! I guess the key is recognising that this isn’t just an event we do on Wednesday afternoons, but a lifestyle that we’re trying to develop – one in which we are open to what God is doing and then going and getting involved, whatever the context. So it’s definintely a journey we’re all on… and an exciting one at that!

If you haven’t been out on a Wednesday yet you should come do it… this week in fact. It’s just so exciting to see God stuff happen out in the real world. It’s awesome to pray with our family in the church, but it’s absolutely wicked cool to pray for some random* on the street who might not even heard of Jesus before – that’s the whole living it out part, right? Even if you think it’s all completely nuts and you couldn’t think of anywhere else you’d like to spend your afternoon less, just come and give it a try – God’ll surprise you. (And we’ll walk you through everything, explain all the “american” buzz words etc etc). Just do it!

* random to you, not random to God.

Hunting for Treasure!

This past Wednesday we started the first of hopefully many ‘Campus Treasure Hunts’. The general premise is quite simple: we ask God for clues, go out and hunt for the ‘treasure’, then seek pray for and bless whoever we find.

Despite the trepidation and spiritual attack that seemed prevalent among most of the guys planning to come, it is a testimony in itself that ten people showed up to give this thing a go. We hung out for a bit, then spent some time worshipping and ministering to each – toppi ng ourselves up with the Holy Spirit where we had leaked. Following this we spent a short time filling out the gaps in our ‘treasure maps’ with clues in the following categories: Location, Name, Appearance, Prayer, Unusual, Smell, Number, Sounnd. Then we split up into two groups and between ourselves decided where we should start the search.

Fast forward a couple of hours to when we reunited after the hunt, and the nervousness of the early afternoon had been replaced with a joy and excitement – both about what had happened while we were out and also in anticipation about how God would use this into the future. We didn’t see anyone saved on the street, but we had the opportunity to pray with and prophesy over a number of people who might never have encountered Jesus otherwise. To whet your appetite here are a few quick examples of what went on:

“Having left the house to head for uni we decided to first check out the bus stop* outside our starting point due to the clues that other people had: yew tree, tree, corner of wilbraham road. As soon as we turned the corner we saw a lady with a walking stick who had short, curly hair, gold glasses and a blue jacket. So we quickly parked up and had to literally chase after her (in a non-threatening way, of course!) before she got home. The two guys who had most of the clues approached her and asked if they could pray for anything for her. She agreed and even commented that she was suffering from back pain. So then and there the guys prayed for her and blessed her. She attends a 7^th Day Adventist church and so was even keen to find out where we were from. It was so encouraging to have such an accurate find after just 30 seconds of looking – this treasure hunting is easy!!! Or so we thought… ”

“One of our groups was sat on the steps by the library when a guy with a yellow top walked past. They went and asked if his name was Tom. It was actually Dan but his friend who was standing next to his was called Tom. So the team chatted with him (Dan) and he shared that he was generally worried and was struggling with some relationship issues. He agreed to let the team pray for him. While they were praying it became obvious that he was having a real encounter with the Holy Spirit – every time something was prayed that hit the mark (e.g. exam stress) he visibly responded. He left feeling encouraged and blessed – awesome.”

“Having approached and struck out on one tall man who was wearing both blue and green, we saw another tall guy with a bright blue jacket and a beard across the street holding a sign for a club night. We approached him and asked if his name was Steve or Paul. He said no but, unpurturbed, we proceeded to ask if he was feeling well today or if he had any pain anywhere. He said that he was fine but his friend piped up and told us that he did have a headache so we asked if we could pray for him. His immediate response was “no” to which I replied it was no problem. He then instantly changed his mind and decided it would actually be ok. So I prayed a simple prayer for Jesus to heal him of his headache. Unfortunately I suddenly came over all self-conscious, not knowing where to look when praying – people don’t close their eyes like in church!! – and so ended up wrapping things up quickly and moving on. Next time we’ll do some more follow-up, but it was still ace to be able to bless him.”

Who knows what God did in those people? If He actually healed those who were sick? But what we do know is that we created a space in which He could move. In terms of stats, we found twelve “treasures” and got to pray with seven of them. We’re still complete novices at this and probably missed a number of significant opportunities on account of our inexperience/desire to avoid potentially awkward situations. But if was so encouraging to see a group of people stepping out and taking a risk and we know that if we continue to do so, God will use us in greater ways than we can possibly imagine.

Fancy a piece of the action? We’ll be heading out every Wednesday afternoon. Speak to Ralph for more info!

And if you want to know the story behind “Treasure Hunts” you’d be well worth checking this book out (or if you’re in a rush, just read Acts 9):

*Clues from Treasure Maps are in bold

Testimonies

We want to hear from you!

“They overcame him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.”
Revelation 12:11

Testimony is so important. It literally means ‘to bear witness’ to something. So when we testify to something we are declaring that it really happened. And more often than not, the reason it’s necessary to declare it is because otherwise it would be in doubt. (Think about a court-room trial: a witness will testify to what they saw/know in order that truth be reached and a correct verdict be administered)

When it comes to testifying about our walk with God we are essentially doing the same thing: asserting God’s glory, goodness, and even very existence on account of what he has done or is doing in our lives. This has multiple benefits:

1. It gives God the glory he deserves for his work
2. It encourages faith – strengthening that of a believer, whilst creating it in a non-believer.
3. It helps us to overcome the enemy. By bearing witness to God’s goodness we negate the lies of the enemy and it is much easier to recognise God’s truth and so walk in his power.

The verse above says we defeat Satan by two things: Jesus’ sacrifice, and our testimony to it – including how it is impacting our lives right here, right now. We already have the ‘blood’, let’s throw the testimony in there too!

So what have you got to share?

What has God done in your life today, this week, this month, this year? What are you thankful for? What opportunities has he opened up for you? What have you learned? How has God shown his love for you?

What are your stories? We want to hear them. We want to create a culture of bearing witness to the glory of God – so much so that it becomes just a natural attitude; an involuntary reflex of praise.

So please share with us. You can leave a comment below, send me an email or facebook message, or better still use the Contribute page located on the bar at the top of the page ^ (or the link in the sidebar ->)

Anything that comes in I’ll put on here (unless you prefer if I didn’t) and we can share in each other’s blessings!