Rob Butler Blog
October 10, 2009 by
Filed under Renovate Features
July 24th 2010
Now the end is here! Been Blogging since quite early on my pais year! I’ll count how many there has been. A few people have said they read it which is good! I enjoy writing it but its been really good that people have read it too.
I had a great week at the Resonate Conference for people staying on Pais next year as team leaders learned loads and hopefully passed the exam which we were set. The week finished with Graduation service which all my Parents and sister came to see. Was a great service but sad to have to say goodbye to guys on other teams that I probably won’t see for a while and its sad when you think I may not see them again. Thank goodness for Facebook!
That reminds me, the night prior to the graduation we had the graduation ball which was really good fun. There was an award ceromony with different categories. I won the award for Social Media Addict. I guess it wasn’t a compliment really but I took it as one. Its rare that being an addict is a good thing. Addicted to God is good though.
Back to Saturday we then went to Pizza hut in Cleveleys where loads of the young people from our church were. That was when I had to say goodbye to all the young people and Alex and Sandra. Which was hard, don’t know when I will see them again. Had a great time there. Then we went for a drive along the prom. Did you the song I do like to be beside the seaside is talking about Blackpool. Also on facts about Blackpool there are more churches than pubs in Blackpool apparently. Definately not the case in Southampton.
Went to Renovate for the last time on Sunday. Leanne, Sophie, Josh, Hannah, Phil and Sam all said really lovely stuff about me up the front as did ann in her talk. Was completely shocked by my leaving present, an ipod touch! Amazing. just loading songs on it now. Was forced to sing tie me kangaroo down sport at church which was fun too, not many people can say they’ve done that.
Renovate is an amazing church were I’m sure amazing things will continue to happen in the future.
It was really amazing having loads of the young people supporting us at the graduation and at church it was great to think that we had done something in their lives and they wanted to say thank you for that. I was pleased to see that what I had done had made a difference to peoples lives and although I might be leaving something I have done or said may stay with them
Heading back home was strange, having had a year in Blackpool and St Annes to suddenly know that I won’t be going back there for ages is rather strange. It was quite annoying that I didn’t get to see the seafront as it should be as they were working on it all year. So i’ll have to go back and look at that properly. I did go in the sea though, I don’t think many of the others did this year. I was ill the day after I went in the sea though! I think it was a coincedence.
Well this is my last blog. Thank you for reading it. I have really it when people have said they have read my blog its been brilliant that you have been willing to spend time finding out what I have been doing. I really appreciate that. I loved it when I would look at how many people had clicked on my page and it would be well over 50 after a blog had been posted. I am sure half of those just clicked on the links I put out or maybe even more but there were some people that actually read it. I really hope that I have put across how amazing Pais is and how much fun it is to do a year with this organisation. I have learned so much and loads of memories of great times and of great people will stay with me for ever. If you want to know more information about the Pais Project go to www.paisproject.com, you can join up for September if you want! You can email me about it too
If you want to contact me you can do so at
Twitter www.twitter.com/robwfc
I think my new blog is at http://robwfc.blogspot.com/ mmm I think!
Also Check out Renovate Life Church’s website www.renovatelifechurch.org.uk
Thanks again for reading, have an amazing summer!
Oh and in answer to the amount of blogs its 46!
God Bless!
July 10th 2010
Nothing is better than a 14 hour day working day! We have been at st marks church Layton today doing an M4 day! My group went to Revoe to Sandra and Hayleys church and digged up all the weeds. Was really good fun. In the evening we had a ball. I had put my shirt in my bag and not folded it so I looked a bit scruffy! Loads of kids came for the whole day was awesome.
They say you learn something new everyday. Well today I found out when the green man is showing on traffic lights a button spins around underneath the box where the normal button you press is. Its for blind people to know when its safe to cross. Really clever. After posting about this on facebook I realise this isn’t a new thing and has happened “forever” I felt a bit silly but excited at the same time!
So today was my last day with Pais in Blackpool. Off to Burnley on Monday for the Resonate confrence for people who are staying on Pais next year. Then there a commisioning service and I’ll be back in Southampton a week on Monday. Seems quite strange that I’ll be seeing everyone from there again so soon. I have church tommorow which is my penultimate service. My parents and my sister are coming to Renovate next week which will be fun.
Tommorow is going to be spent packing with it all hopefully finished by the time the world cup final starts. Would love to see Holland win. I guess because spain were favourites maybe.
Just realised recently there is a good word program on my phone so have done the last couple of blogs whilst walking home. That’s what I’m doing now. I was on the bus for a bit. Its raining screens getting wet.
Was super pleased this morning when I looked at the Renovate website stats. There had been 44 visitors when I looked early this morning. I had posted yesterdays blog on there early this morning. I post about it on Facebook renovates twitter and my own twitter and a random other one. It often seems to get a good few hits after that. The renovate twitter has well over 1500 following it which is awesome!
Well need some beauty sleep! God Bless. thanks for reading.
July 9th 2010
So again not long left and just had my last ever Renovate Cafe. Quite strange, loads of people there some I got to say goodbye to and others I didn’t. The thing is Renovate Cafe isn’t a youth group as such, its a drop in group. You can come and go as you want. This means that although quite a lot of the young people are the same there are loads of new people each week. I have loved this group its my church’s group and it often has 50 kids in of a night. Its great, the vision needs to be spread and people need to understand why we do it to then want to get along side and help out. We want to show God’s love to these kids through kindness, love and generosity. We give out food each week and people can come along and eat it for free. As I said Hannah is taking it on, I believe she will do amazing things if the right people step alongside to support her.
After the cafe I had a moment which was so special to me. An act of unselfishness and amazingness. Someone had pulled up some freshly laid turf at the park so we placed it back down again. To which a young person came along and pulled up another bit. We told them they were spoiling it for everyone else. We had decided to sit down and then go and sort it out in a couple of minutes. Then another group of lads came over a few minutes later and grabbed the turf and put it back where it should have been. I was so delighted this young person had nothing to do with this turf being out of place but decided he would stop what he was doing to put it back how it was. An act of kindness to the community. It’s hard to bring over how amazing it was. I don’t remember ever having a tear in my eye from something I’ve seen in real life. I’ve had it with films and tv but never in a siutation like that but this act brought a tear to my eye. Please understand this is the next generation these are the young people who are going to be our next adults. We were chatting with police about a man who shouted at the young people tonight. Yes the young people can be trouble but most of the time they are just awesome people. Sadly the times when they are troublesome are the times that they get mentioned and everyone sees it. If you say rubbish about the youth then I challenge you what have you done to help them what have you done to speak into their lives, what have you done with them that lets you say they are rubbish, when have you given a young person your time and effort. I know I’m not great but it. I do know these young people are awesome and I might not have a deep friendship with many of the kids my surface friendship tells me they are all amazing people with huge potential. God Bless that young person, I hope he took my shout of encouragement seriously. It might not have meant a lot to you to hear the story but it was so powerful to me.
To end the evening we had an open mic night Phil Devoy from church sang Breakfast at Tiffanys really well. Hannah and James sang the christian long. Never let go by Matt Redman. James and I sang Bohemian Rhapsody, it was amazing fun.
Going to be gardening tommorow in Revoe and loads of other cool stuff!
8th July
I haven’t got this blog for much longer I thought I might make the most of it! I won’t be doing an update after Sunday until the following Sunday. That will be when I return to Southampton for the summer. Not quite sure what I am going to do over the summer yet. I think I need to have a big car boot sale, selling all the books I have in my room but know that I will never read. I have so many autobiographies of people that I like but know that I will not read them most likely. I must have at least 20. I’ve come to realise the best way to “read” a book is on a audiobook. I have listened to Nelson Mandelas Autobiography and Gazzas, I have Martin Luther Kings biography to listen to next. I came to realise that Nelson Mandela is one of those people who everyone has heard of and we know he went to prison and we know he protested but I realise that I didn’t know much more about it apart from that. So thought i’d listen to it and find out a bit more. It was very intresting. Gazzas was really intresting too but I knew quite a lot of it already. I have read Tony Adams autobiography, Frank Skinners and David Beckhams. One of the ones I am annoyed that I haven’t managed to read the whole way through is Roy Castles. Roy Castle was an incredible man he was the host of Record Breakers and a great Christian. He once held the world record for holding the most world records! He died of cancer which was due to passive smoking. I love one of his quotes “Don’t whine – laugh.” When you have cancer I think thats a really powerful thing to say. It is so easy to whine but even though thats bad there are still things to enjoy! I think he was an amazing person. I noticed that his wife Fiona is talking in Blackpool in a couple of weeks. I have wanted to listen to her talk for a while but sadly I will be back in Southampton by then.
Tonight we had Alpha its was all about healing and whether God still heals in these times. It was intresting because God definately does heal. There are so many people that aren’t healed though. A great friend of mine an old man from my Church in Southampton was in a wheelchair. He came along every week to the Communion service that happened on a Wednesday morning. He lived locally but the effort it took him to get into and out of the chair was so much. Despite this pain he came pretty much every week to the service and it was great to chat to him and I would push him back up to his house and we would chat some more. If he was to say that he was not able to come because it was an effort I don’t think many people would have thought badly but he came every week. I quite oftened missed church in those days because I didn’t feel like it. This really spoke to me. I should have the same attitude as he did. He went without fail every week despite the difficulties. I have no difficulties I should go. Going back to the original point, I often prayed that he would be healed that he would be able to walk again, sadly this never happened. However, I think God sometimes doesn’t heal people because they do greater things through their problems than they could if they were healed. Everyone who has an issue like this has my respect. Sadly my friend died but I still remember what he did and its still so powerful to me. Infact I think he was one of the only people who said anything positive about Blackpool. Actually I would tend to think that his opinion was correct and the negative ones weren’t in my opinion.
Tommorow is my last Renovate Cafe. Its going to be great I can’t wait! Although it will be really sad to say goodbye. Hannah is taking over the running of it. She is an amazing person and she was definitely the person that I hoped would take over the reigns when I left.
I meant to mention the last Ignite. It was great we sang our God is an awesome God but the whole version with verse and chorus. We had sung it in Russia but none of knew the bit that isn’t our God is an awesome God but they were also singing in Russian so we couldn’t learn it. So it was great to sing it that night. One of my favourite things although highly Blasphemous was when the young people started singing Our Rob is an Awesome Rob. I asked that if they were singing that that they wouldn’t sing the other lines. Because I definately do not reign from heaven above with wisdom power and love.
My last “The Switch” was really good too, we went to the beach and played football and had food. We were being attacked my multitudes of seagulls it was quite funny. Jake who was has been on work experience with Pais got erm a little gift from one of them on his shoulder. They seemed to have invented a new rule which is if there is a disagreement on whether it is a goal or not then there is a penalty. I tried to stop this, shots were going wide and they’d get a penalty. I think they might get a shock if they ever play football properly although I guess if you play football properly then it isn’t jumpers for goalposts or infact sandmounds for goals posts!
I must try harder to get to bed at a sensible time. 12.30am is not a sensible time. My brain says I need 8 hours sleep and as I am getting up at 9 I still have that. But still I should go to bed earlier this will be something I shall definately try and improve on. However it is fun writing this blog! Check out the renovate website there is loads of good stuff on there!
Thanks for reading
God Bless and
Check out twitter!
www.twitter.com/renovatelife
www.twitter.com/robwfc
7th July 2010
So this has been and is my last week in Blackpool. It has been an amazing year, meeting loads of amazing people, seeing lots of amazing places and working for an amazing church and working for an amazing organisation with amazing people.
It has taught me a lot. New life skills I have learnt are that if you are being punched and kicked by a kid then it is quite easy not to react and just ignore it. There are some children that telling them off just doesn’t work, because they just get told off all the time anyway. Its hard with these sorts of kids because they think that violence, swearing and retaliating are right. Which they are not. With this group of kids we have tried to show Gods love by our actions. When we had the group in the church andwe had to stop the group most weeks we still let them back in the next week. I think often they aren’t cared about at home and sometimes this is accidental and the parents really do care for the kids they just don’t show it. Other times the parents sadly don’t care about their kids. Sometimes they need some encouraging words and knowing that someone cares about them. I remember being told about when one of them was attacking another one and James was explaining how if you do that then you end up in jail. To which they told James that they didn’t care if he ended up in jail to which James responded that he cared, they were shocked and confused. I wish I had been there to see it. It sounded like a really powerful moment. Even the notion that someone possibly cared for them was foreign to them. Really sad, I’m hoping that Pais Blackpool can do amazing things and show young people across the area that they are cared for by both Pais leaders as well as God. Having said that though it is amazing to see the change in mindset of some of them. I would love to meet up with them when they are older and see how they turned out.
Renovate Life Church is amazing, its been great to be there at a time where it has grown. It feels like I have been there for the interim period. The time after the Renovate Rock church and before the church moves back to its old home of the Island but it has been amazing. There have been loads of new people come in. When I first came there was about 14 people each week and that was if we were lucky. Renovate now gets between 30 and 40 quite a lot of time. If all those people can work together there will be no stopping the church. It will be able to do great things. I would definitely like to go back there when the church moves back to The Island. The church used to meet at the Island but on my second week at the church the building was closed down so we couldn’t meet there anymore. After that we moved to Anns house for a couple of weeks and then we moved to the YMCA which is its current home. The church has been doing an alpha course which has been going well that finishes in a couple of weeks. If you want a church to start going to then there won’t be a church that is more welcoming than Renovate!
I just got back from watching My Fair Lady with Hayley and Hannah. It was really good and its got loads of great songs in it. I hadn’t seen it before but I had seen an amateur production of it once which was pretty good. I’d recommend it.
The world cup is coming to an end. Gutting. Holland V Spain in the final. It’s one of those matches who I don’t really know who to support. But I am going to cheer on Holland I think. I was hoping that it would be Spain v Uruguay in the final but I was supporting Uruguay then Holland, Then Spain then Germany. So its fair that I am now supporting Spain. I was gutted that Murray (I nearly typed henman oops) got knocked out in the semis at Wimbledon. It’s a bit like the world cup I want a British person (Preferably English) to win Wimbledon and I’d love to see England win the world cup in my lifetime. I think the Wimbledon dream is probably slightly more likely. I think we always forget that we are really good at other sports. We are dominating in F1 Hamilton and Button are the last two winners and it looks like one of them will win it again soon. It’s the first year in ages that I haven’t watched any F1 it seemed less exciting without the fuels stops in the race I saw. I’ll start watching again next year, with or without fuel stops!
I think next week is going to be my last Renovate Blog, however I have set up another one elsewhere. Not sure if anyone will read it. Not sure if anyone reads this but its actually really fun to do so I’m not to bothered if people read it or not but I’d prefer that they did. There are often a good few more hits to the website when I put up on twitter and facebook about the blog, so if it isn’t being read its being clicked on. A side note why is read and read the same, I realise that doesn’t put the point across. But I red a book and I read a book, is how it should surely be. Oh I don’t know it seems daft to me. I always want to type red, but write it read because that’s what you’re supposed to do!
God Bless!
29th June 2010
Well the last time I did the blog, I was just about to head off to youth group and have a shower, shock horror I didn’t have the shower! Oh well, I stink. The next day we were going to go London, we left at 4am. Somehow the alarm I set at 3.45am didn’t go off. Luckily I woke up at 3.58am and then met the others and we went to Preston. I just thought of Preston Lacy he is a big guy from the television series Jackass. I’ve watched loads of Jackass recently, there have been 3 films and I have watched all three of them in the last week! Anyway I digress. So we got a megabus to London then went to Covent Garden for the day. “The home of English Street entertainment” There were 3 acts that we saw. The first act that we saw was a man that did juggling and he saw me in the crowd and asked me to volunteer. There was a line of 5 of us head to toe and the guy did a walking handstand over all of us. It was quite good but I didn’t feel like I needed to lie down for 20 minutes just for that! Then the next act came on and he also picked me to be his volunteer. He blindfolded me and then put a match in my mouth and somehow managed to light the match whilst doing tricks with his yo-yo i’d love to tell you how he did it but I had a blindfold on so I couldn’t see. Then I had to tie him up in a straight jacket and chains and he escaped. It was quite good fun! In the evening Hannah, James, Sandra, Alex, Hayley and Hannah’s sister Joy went to watch the musical wicked which has something to do with the Wizard of Oz. I watched the football instead. It was Greece v Germany which I think was really good fun too. The rest of them seemed to really enjoy wicked. We had also watched the England V Slovenia that day which was a good game but now seems slightly irrelevant because of the result of Sunday’s game.
We went to a Chinese restaurant and half way through eating we thought it changed nice but a bit strange. We later realised that it was a vegan restaurant. Very tasty though.
I wasn’t feeling very well again on Friday, not sure why but it was quite annoying. Pleased to be back to work this week and feeling a lot better!
On Saturday I got to do some gardening for Phil and Lisa who I live with. I cut down a few trees and trimmed others. I had cuts and bruises all on my arms but it was really good fun still!
Then the big issue, England lost. Well it was fairly awful wasn’t it! Sandra was polite and said that England played well. Its true we did when we scored the two goals but that was about it. Germany completely outclassed us. Having said that I would still like to see capello stay on as the manager. I don’t think there is anyone better out there to replace him.
Thanks for reading
God Bless
Rob!!
June 22nd 2010
Sometimes I find it quite hard to think of things that I have done in the previous weeks. Its quite a good thing that I do loads with work because otherwise I wouldn’t have much to put in this blog thing! However to be fair (For the football fans out there, Peter Beardsley says To be fair an awful lot! Listen out for it) with the World Cup and Wimbledon, i’ll be keeping busy for the next few weeks. That’s as long as England get through tomorrow and Murray gets through today otherwise I won’t have anything to watch at all! Unless Greece get through in the football then I’ll cheer them on but playing the Argentinians it would seem unlikely. I was very pleased that Uruguay got through today and was also quite pleased that France got knocked out. My brother lived in Uruguay for a while so I will be cheering them on in the next round too. I think the French don’t really like us, which kind of makes me want to see them lose.
Have been feeling a bit ill the last few days, so was off work on Monday, I was in bed watching Wimbledon. I was so hoping Federer would lose it looked like he would be then he didn’t which was a shame.
I was counting in my head the amount of DVD’s and VHS videos I have of Kids tv. I realised I had 36 and I may have missed some out. Oh wait I definitely have I forgot all the Bob the builders I have and all the trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley ones. I literally did just remember them all. It looked a bit fake in the blog but it was true I did just remember them! I think I have 9 Trumpton Camberwick Green and Chigley ones and 5 Bob the builder ones although it could be more. Eek thats over 50! However they are amazing and I still love kids tv loads especially from my era. I think its hit a low at the moment and you could just say I have grown up. Perhaps but there are still some programs now which are good. Most of them are new versions of old shows though. I think the best one of this era is Charlie and Lola, its an amazing show. I would like to get them on DVD, I quite like 64 Zoo Lane too thats good. One that I watched when I was Mannying (Google it) was Captain Mac which was an ITV one. I think that might be from a couple of years ago though. So the current crop I might be a bit behind on. I watched an amazing one in wales called Dic A Dei A Delyth sad thing is it’s in Welsh but subtitles are in English. They are three builders its amazing!
Its less than a month now until I leave Blackpool. We have a Graduation Service on 18th July in Burnley, If you’d like to come along give me a shout, would be great to see anyone there. Have had an awesome time here and its been great being with Renovate Life Church. The church is really great and it’s got loads of amazing people I can’t wait to go back there in a year or so and see how it’s progressing. I have had a great time staying with Phil and Lisa they are really great people and have been brilliant in letting me stay with them!
Well I need a shower before I head back to work. We have Ignite youth group which is always great fun. I have new shower gel which is also fun! I also got some new jeans at the same time as I got the shower gel. I tried to get to Fleetwood but didn’t quite make it to the bit where the cheap stuff is so ended up in Asda. Asda is an amazing shop. I could stay in an Asda for hours. So many sections!
Oh before I go. We went on a social to the beach the other day. We were paddling in the sea, there wasn’t any sand as the tide had come in so far there were some steps so we were walking down them and trying not to get wet. A bit of a game of chicken. I got bored and took my shirt off and swam in the sea. It was really great fun it took hours for my trousers to dry though L was good though. I think that might be why I haven’t been feeling so good. It would make sense!
Anyways God Bless you!
Remember the twitter. www.twitter.com/robwfc. I got a message from http://twitter.com/EndWaterPoverty great organisation you should check them out. Their website is http://www.endwaterpoverty.org/
June 15th 2010
Another busy week its going to be a double posting this week. The site was down for a bit last week so I thought it wasn’t worth posting a blog then. So I will post this weeks and last weeks at the same time. I hope you enjoy! I went to the Blackpool Pleasure beach this week which was rather exciting. I was expecting the rides to be quite tame and not all that exciting apart from The Big One. I was wrong though there were loads of really good rides. The Pepsi Max Big One ride is a rollercoaster I think its the steepest rollercoaster in Europe. When you get to the top of the rollercoaster just before you go down there is the most amazing view all over the sea and the beach and the promenade. Before you go down really quickly. There were loads of really great rides. The one I found the most scary was one that I don’t think was supposed to be scary at all. It was a horse racing ride and you’d go round the track on horse shaped vehicle and you went round on a thin piece of track. It felt like we were going to fall off the track each time we went around a corner. I went on one ride and was sat next to a Southampton fan which was quite exciting, for those of you who don’t know Southampton is where I am originally from. I found out he was from Chandlers Ford which is only a few miles away from where I live. Rather exciting. I just checked it out on Google maps its 4.7 miles away and it would take 11 mins to drive it. I was thinking it was closer than that, but Google Maps is never wrong! (This is not part of the blog but an added noted. Got a message from my cousin asking had I sat next to a saints fan at the pleasure beach. Turned out to be a friend of his and they had been discussing it..Small world.. Back to the blog) A great day though all in all. I’d recommend to everyone to go there its really fun!
I watched Shrek 1 which I thought I’d watched on a plane just after 9/11 but I soon realised that I didn’t remember anything from the film at all and came to the conclusion that I hadn’t seen it at all. It was probably as good as shrek 2 which I previously had liked more. I’m wondering whether Shrek 4 is one too many. I liked Shrek 3 but it wasn’t as good as 1 and 2. But we shall see. The trailers look quite funny i’ll definitely go and watch it. The other film I can’t wait to see is Toy Story 3. I really hope that that is as good as 1 and 2, its one of those films I had accepted that there would only ever be 2 so it was amazing to hear that they’d be releasing another one. Can’t wait to watch it!
Renovate just had its 2nd Birthday so we had a party at church this Sunday to celebrate this occasion. It was really enjoyable and it was great that we had more than 70 people at the service that morning which is the most that has been there since I’ve been there. There were loads of new faces that I hadn’t seen, well I guess some of them were old faces that hadn’t been since I’d been to the church. There were also people who hadn’t been before. It was especially great because there were a good few people that are usually there that weren’t there. We’ll see whether more come along regularly.
6th June 2010
So another blog! We have been in Burnley for a few days on our M4 Conference. With 7 young people from Blackpool! We did loads of community projects in Burnley including litter picking the local area which was really good fun! There are pictures of one of the bits that we cleaned up on Twitter. It looked so much better when we had done it. There was loads of random things that we found when we were litter picking. A couple of bikes and a shopping trolley the usual kind of things that you find in a canal. I never quite understand the trolley in the canal thing. Why would you put one in the canal, why wouldn’t you leave it at the side of the road. Just thinking about it now maybe there wasn’t a shopping trolley, I’ve confused myself now. Maybe my brain added it in so that I could do my little trolley in the canal rant!
We got to go to Dan Randalls church in Accrington, which was really good. Sandra and I did a creative prayer session which went well. It was really awesome to see lots of the Pais people that we don’t get to see all that often. We get to see everyone who is going to be a team leader again next year at Resonate. Which is a conference for all those people who are staying on with Pais. Really looking forward to staying on with Pais, it will be really sad to leave Blackpool and will miss all the young people that I have got to know through the year. However it’s going to be really amazing setting up a new youth team in Weymouth. It’s looking really positive at the moment, there was some doubt as to whether there would be enough churches to start the team but it’s looking a lot more positive now which is amazing.
After the M4 conference in Burnley we had m4 part 2 in Blackpool. In Revoe, St Annes and Layton. We did litter picking, dog walking, coffee stalls, car washing, games on park, prayer room, cake baking and gardening. All for free to benefit the local communities. It went really well and we had great conversations with loads of people over the areas. It was really special because some kids came along to help in Burnley as well as coming along everyday Tuesday to Friday in those areas meaning basically they have given up the whole of their half term to serve other communities. People talk about “The kids of Today” Actually I would say these are the kids of today. Sadly they aren’t the ones who get in the newspapers. I felt so proud of everyone who gave up any part of their time to help.
There is a local swimming pool in Blackpool called the Sandcastle which I went to for the first time with Hayley and some of the young people. It was super fun I went on a ride with one of the some of the young people one of them you go in a double rubber ring down a steep hill a bit like a half pipe in skateboarding its really good fun it went super fast. Then I went on another one in a single rubber ring and it said its the longest waterflume in England. That was on Saturday, Watched Britains got talent in the evening. I was disappointed because I wanted impressionist Paul Burling to win the show he did some amazing impressions. I think he will do amazingly even though he didn’t win. My favourite that didn’t get through to final was a guy who swallowed things and regurgitated them back up again. He had a key, a lock and a ring individually and then he locked the key into the lock and when he swallowed them he undid them in his stomach one of the most amazing tricks I have ever seen! But he was in the same show as Tobias an amazing dancer and the winners spellbound so it was understandable kind of. Britains got talent is one of the few shows that I rarely miss. One of the other ones is the Apprentice. I am really loving the Junior Apprentice at the moment its really good. I can’t wait for the real series to start now.
Now have two days off which will be really nice. Looking forward to enjoying them!
God Bless.
18th May 2010
Hey another week gone by, time for the Renovate Blog! I reckon there is probably gonna be 8 more before the end of the summer term! Its getting closer and closer. Not quite sure what I’m up to yet over the summer. I would quite like to go away to somewhere, just not sure where. It will be good to go back to Southampton for a few weeks over the summer and catch up with friends and family again.
We have had a good week this week. We have been doing Alpha at Renovate Life Church which is a course to help people understand more about God and about the bible and about the Christian faith. We have had 3 weeks of the course so far and its going really well. We have had about 10 people on the course altogether although some people haven’t come all the weeks.
Friday was a good fun day, in the afternoon we went to the cafe that James’ brother Ben works at. It was really good. I had an All day breakfast, Sandra had Haddock and James had Jacket potato with Cheese and beans. The owners of the cafe are Christians and it was a really great place and the food was amazing. Ben wasn’t in at the time as he was packing as he is heading down to Portland to be a youth worker there.
Linking in well we went to Bens leaving do which was at the Moss house, we had a BBQ at his and we got to meet loads of really cool people, most of them from were from Flyde Christian Service Church which is the church that Ben goes to and we have a Pais team there with Alex as their Pais worker. Ben is a really great guy and it will be a shame to not have him around for the rest of this year.
We had a spirituality day at St Georges school, I had to do a talk on a Multifaith society. My favourite part of it was a picture quiz where you had to name who the person in the picture was and then name what religion they are. We had Monty Panesar the England Cricketer who is Sikh, Dev Patel who was in Skins and Slumdog Millionaire that is Hindu, George Bush the former president who is Christian apparently, Amir Kahn the boxer who is Muslim and then the one that surprised me was Orlando Bloom who is a Buddist. It was a really good day seeing people’s different opinions. There was a Hindu gentleman who came into the school and I got a good chance to learn more about his faith and he was able to share about his faith with the young people too.
It’s been a busy week with work so not done all that many social activities but next week will definitely do more that I can put into this here blog.
I’m still on twitter. www.twitter.com/robwfc
9th May 2010
I have been busy the last week or so so alas no posts on my blog. It has been a really good week, last week I spent the week in Weymouth and Portland checking out the Weymouth and Portland Pais Team. It was a really great opportunity to see how another team works and it was great to spend time with all the team. We did kids groups, went into school and had some great fun in the local parks. I went to St Francis church which is in Littlemore and went to both the services there and got a chance to meet some people from the church this is the team that Sam and Hayley are based at this year. One of my favourite things I did whilst here was on Thursday of this week, the team usually have a club on Thursdays but the building it was usually in was being used for polling for the election so instead we went to the park. Initially I played football with a couple of young lads and Darren who is the Childrens worker at St Francis but then we went to the skate ramp where the kids were playing a game called “King of the heel” I hadn’t heard of it before but this is how it works, you have one person who is the king of the heel they are the one who has to try and catch the others. The others are sat at the top of the half pipe of the ramp with their legs dangling over the side. The person who is the king of the heel has to pull them down the ramp and then tag them and climb up to the top without being recaught. Its complicated but it was amazing fun.
I went to a group called Hothouse where we had food and played rounders which was awesome fun. We had an election video for which was the best bible character (http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=439965935032&oid=89037964812 )
I had a couple of meetings with people in Weymouth to discuss about youth work and the possibility of churches working with the new Weymouth and Portland youth team which will be starting in September which if all goes to plan I will be heading up.
I got to go out with the street pastors in Weymouth. They are an organisation that helps out people on Friday nights and Saturday nights in towns, giving water to people who need it, giving flipflops to people who need footwear and other great stuff like that. We went until 4am on Saturday morning then I left at 9.50am to get back to Blackpool
Since I have been back in Blackpool I competed in a 10k run. I completed it in 1hr 12mins I hadn’t done any training so was quite pleased with that. if you’d like to sponsor me the money is going to pais project the organisation that I work for. It would be great if you can https://www.paypal.com and then send the money to paisallstars@yahoo.com
Need to catch up on sleep I haven’t quite had enough so will end the blog there!
Thanks for reading God Bless!
(p.s the picture is me)
22nd April
I forgot to do a post from Southampton when I was there so have had loads of weeks without a blog! Well surely nothing that drastic could have happened in that time, not like all the countries planes could be grounded or anything like that!
I had a great time in Southampton got to see loads of people who I hadn’t seen for ages. Played 2 games of risks which is one of the best games ever and have since played it with the team in Blackpool. Annoyingly I haven’t won any of the three games. Although we played Risk a few times I think my favourite game that we played was the “Tell me Quiz”. I have this game at my house and you spin a dial and it chooses a letter then you select a card and it will say something like A type of car beginning with the chosen letter. If you get it right you get the card. Its a fairly simple game. I went round to my friend Chris’s house and he has it but it was slightly different. On the card the statements are in English and French. Me, Chris and our other friend played it with the question being asked in French. If you could answer in English with the french question you got 2 points, if you had to have the question read in English then you could only get one point for getting it correct. We had a battle between the three of us, each playing each other once. We hardly spoke a word of English the whole time apart from answering in English. Fred played Chris. I think Chris won that. I played Chris and Fred so I won. Moi est le champignon. I am the mushroom! Or Champion! Great fun.
I went to the new Coffee place in Portswood which is near where I live its called Trago lounge it is an amazing place an amazing atmosphere and it has amazing cake too. I went there with 2 friends who were on my team when I went to Ukraine a few years back, Becca and Nicola and I hadn’t seen them for ages was brilliant.
Spent a few days at the local pub with a glass of coke and a New york chicken. New york chicken is one of the nicest meals ever! Chicken with Cheese and bbq sauce onto of it and its only £4.99! Met loads of people there. There are two pubs quite near to me one is called the Crown and this seems to be everyones favourite. They do the famous crown inn burger which is very nice but not after you’ve had it as many times as I have! But the place where I have the new york chicken is the Highfield which for some reason everyone seems to hate but I really like it there. I realised I had been in there slightly too much before I started Pais when they knew that I would be ordering a coke when I went in. I’ve never got into the whole thing Alcohol, I think there is a stage where you have to force yourself to like it because it usually doesn’t taste good the first time you try it. I decided not to go through this stage. I have tried alcohol now and again but never really liked any of it that I have tried. Coke and Pepsi are so much better in my opinion and you don’t get a nasty hangover in the morning after if you drink too much, which is a good thing otherwise I think I would have coke hangovers a lot! It isn’t great for your teeth though is the only thing but surely that is the only bad thing about it!
Since I had been away my friend Laurence and his family have opened a pizza shop. Bassett Pizza and Chicken. I spent a few nights having food from there. The pizza they do is amazing and the chicken is awesome too. Kfc better watch out! Check out there facebook page http://bit.ly/915loq. I recommend it. I did a job that I hadn’t done before which was leaflet delivering for them! Had a great time seeing Laurence lots, we always manage to talk forever about Football and Wrestling!
Since I have been back I have been on my own. Lisa and Phil from church who I live with have been stuck abroad because of the flights being cancelled. Hopefully be back soon! Been mainly working which has been fun, went to watch a film called blindside the other day, its a great film I recommend you watch it. Its about a boy who is an outcast at school but gets adopted… well I won’t spoil it but thats the start of the film!
As you can probably see from the picture, I had a haircut today. I was getting a bit fed up of it going in my hair so I have gone short instead!
Well thats the last 20 days or however long it has been. I’ve been to church lots of times in that time too that’s been great.
God Bless you!
Have a great week!
30th March 2010
Just to say its an old Photo again! I am not taking enough photos of myself it would seem. Trying to work out who the mystery commenter is again. I thought i’d worked it out but unless lots of people are lying to me then I haven’t!
I am sat in St Marks church with a Pais Director Richard McGuiness, Sandra and James. We are working hard whilst trying to help Richard with online quizzes. We have had quizzes on Pixar animations, Simpsons Characters and Enemies in films. It’s been good fun, James and Richard are trying to do one on Zoolander now. I have never seen it. This is a lunch break well it was anyway. Its been good though. The others have gone into Layton school and are going on a retreat to the Lake District tonight which James, Sandra, Hayley and I went on last week. It was awesome fun.
We went up to the Lake District on Tuesday evening and missed ignite which was a shame. Whilst their we did some cool walks, I went for a walk along by the water and by the local railway station. It was amazing seeing lots of sheep and chickens. I really enjoyed putting the food out for the birds on the bird table outside the static home that we were staying in. There was a bird book there I have become a slight ornithologist. I think I saw Blue and great Tits, Robins, I reckon i saw a Raven but it could have been a crow but it didn’t look like a crow in the book. Great fun. I’ve made sure that the others who are going there this week look after the birds for me. I took some pictures of where we were and they are on twitter and facebook if you want to check them out. We watched Fawlty Towers and loads of films. August Rush, Déjà vu, Nanny Mcphee Déjà vu and Hairspray I had only seen Déjà vu before.
On Saturday we had a busy day. James, Sandra and I had a table top at St Marks, We made £40 from selling videos, Books and Pictures it was great fun! The money we raised went to New Life Church in Revoe. We also had a Fun day which was great fun! We played football on the park and ate food and had loads of fun!
Sunday was amazing! We had church in the morning, I went out to look after some of the kids. They go into a soft play area called Harrys its really cool it has ball pools and slides and zip lines and loads of other stuff. I should have used some commas there oops oh well. After church I met up with my favourite people in the world Dr Anthony Michael Strickland sometimes called Michael or Mike Strickland. But he is a legend and he is originally from Blackpool but has moved down to Southampton a few years ago but he was up visiting his family so we hung out. I went to the Salterns Wharf which was amazing and had a big Carvery and unlimited pepsi. After that we had ice cream and played mini golf with all the Stricklands! Great fun. In the evening we had fusion at Ann’s house. We basically played Wii all night and ate pizza and cake great times. Ann’s grandson seemed like quite a master at most of the games. It was great to have loads of new people there too.
Last night we went to the local cinema with one of our groups and watched Nanny McPhee the new film I can’t remember the tagline but it was quite good if you liked the first one i’d imagine that you’d like the second one, although I won’t promise anything! Wasn’t really my kind of film but it was still really good.
It’s been really great and have had a great time in everything I’ve done. Its nearly Easter so heading home for that. If anyone from Southampton is reading this and would like to catch up that would be great. Give me a shout, a bell, a tweet, an fb message or any kind of communication you choose to use even pigeon post if you know how to do that!
Check out my
tweets at www.twitter.com/robwfc
if you’d like to check out the Renovate Life Church website its www.renovatelifechurch.org.uk its a really great website.
God Bless
20th March 2010
Some said it couldn’t be done, others said they didn’t know how to, however…. There is a comment on this page now from “The mystery commenter” Thank you mystery commenter you are great. I quote “Outnumbered is amazing!” Good job and the great thing about apart from it being the first comment is that it is one of the most true statements of all time.
Before I forget, I am doing a sponsored swim tommorow. To raise money for Mayfield school. It would be great to get a good amount of money for them to support them and show how much we appreciate being allowed into the school! If you would like to support me. Hopefully the link below will work.
[paypal-donation]I digress. The blog! One of my favorite points of this week was when one of the youth at the Renovate cafe asked “Are you Rob?” I asked him the same question with his name replacing Rob. Then he said my Nan works with your dad in Southampton. That is cool. such a small world. I loved it.
The cafe must have had 15 or so in this week in and out. We had a great time, lots of the time the guys were out on the park with James and Hayley playing Manhunt. Irene from church came along with Richard. It was great of them to come along and it was really good. We all went along to an open mic night at a local cafe again like we did a couple of weeks ago. We had a great evening, I think the star of the show was Irene who was singing quietly in the corner to James guitar. Everyone started singing along and then cheered as she finished! Great time. James and I sang Handbags and the gladrags and the wombles. I was singing the wombles, I think I murdered it! Handbags and the gladrags seemed good to me though.
We had a birthday this week in Pais it was Sandra’s birthday! We had a trip to fleetwood, we had fish and chips for £1 bargain! Then went and ate them at Hayleys Grandmas house whilst watching Gospel singing on her DVD’s. Then we went and got ice creams, the majority got White Magnums, I didn’t quite have enough for a white magnum so went for a feast. I haven’t had a feast in ages so although probably not my preferred choice was very pleased with the selection! The birthday girl went for a Mr Whippy! Also a very good choice. Then we went and sat by the beach. Then we went home. It was a bit wet as we were going home, I got soaked as I was wearing a fleetwood mac. (Sorry poor joke)
Had a really good day on Wednesday there was a meeting with all the ministers and the leaders of our team as well as Pete Baker (National director of Pais) We weren’t at this meeting but it was really great to see Pete and Team leader of Burnley Dan Price for a few minutes after this meeting had finished. Dan managed to lift me above his head by holding onto the buckles on my jeans. He managed to get me above his head but It was a bit scary so I forced myself down!
I watched the goonies the other day with Phil and Lisa my host family, it was really funny and great. I keep forgetting if it is Goodies or Goonies. It was the one that doesn’t have Bill Oddie in it!
I am currently listening to Southamptons game against Milton Keynes Dons. Hoping that Southampton can win that. I was hoping that I might be able to listen to Eastleigh or Watford. But Easteligh don’t have commentary available and Watford are playing tommorow. Oh well Its a good game anyway!
So now that we have had The mystery commenter comment I now know that you can all do it! So feel free. I am also intuiged to the identity of The mystery commenter. Feel free to reveal who you are!
God Bless have a good week.
14th March 2010
Just to say the image to the left isn’t a recent photo, I just like it! It was when I got my head shaved for comic relief a few years ago!
I looked at my previous blog posts and thought wouldn’t it be nice if I said hello at the start. I’m not sure whether it will catch on or not, but I felt like I was being a bit rude. Not sure if there is such a thing as blog ettiquette maybe I shall google it now and see. Well I am gonna go for it to be polite. Hi! Hope you’ve had a good 8 days, thanks for reading the blog!
Possibly one of the best Renovate Cafes in my opinion it was truly great. There were only about 10 young people there but this was great because it meant that we could get to know them all and just have a great time with them. I got to go to the park with some of them whilst they were skateboarding and playing football. It was great to join them whilst they were doing that. We also played shut the box, Happy families and the favourite game of Renovate Cafe Zombies aka Manhunt. I really enjoyed it this week especially because Renovates Minister Ann had asked me to speak to a lad who was doing work experience with her in July. I spoke to him on Thursday and he said he’d come along next week. When we got to the cafe we needed more drink so I went to the shops and bumped into a guy that comes along to the cafe and said hi. Then one of his mates turned to me and said “Are you Rob?” It was the guy i’d speaking to the day before. So he came along and seemed to have a great time and is gonna come along next week too. Irene from Renovate came along to help which was really awesome she brought a cake along with her too, a malteaser cake it was divine!
Its hard to recall what I have done in the week sometimes, I found my diary which hasn’t been used all year, I shall look maybe I used it once. Its one of the academic ones, so maybe I used it in September. I am going to start using it again, I feel like I need to get myself more organised also its useful for a blog if you are going to do it everyweek to remember what you did in the week.
Our Monday night group “The Switch” has been split into two groups now. One as a more social group meeting at a house and the other group meeting on the park. It was the first week that this happened but it seemed to work well. It seems like it ticks the boxes of each group. One group likes to run around and have fun and the other group likes to relax and have fun. So we will keep the same format for the future. We were going to rotate leaders for this group but we realised that we needed to keep it the same other wise the kids would get to know 4 leaders quite well rather than 2 leaders really well and vice versa.
Have had a lazy Sunday afternoon. Went to church in the morning and helped with the kids group. They went into the play area that they have at the YMCA where we meet. It has allsorts of things from slides to zip lines, ball parks to swinging punch bags. It was great fun and the time flew by! Watched a bit of the grand prix that happened today on BBC I player. I find it hard watching things that aren’t live. It could be really rubbish and i’d waste a couple of hours watching it. I had also read a facebook status which said that it wasn’t a good race. So I skipped to the last few laps to see who won. I also watched a bit of football which I always enjoy. I also played a computer game the sims 3. One of my favourite games of all time! I recommend it. Also watched Jonathon Ross on BBC I Player too. It had the cast of outnumbered my favourite tv show ever you have to watch it if you haven’t watched it! If you wanna watch it give me a shout and i’ll watch it with you! It also had the Amy Williams the winner of the Gold medal for GB at the winter olympics and Charlotte church too who I think is great!
Well its been good chatting, we must do it again sometime! Tweet me, facebook me, skype me, text me, ring me, email me. Get in contact any of those ways.
God Bless
6th March 2010
Well as you are probably aware if you read the last blog it hasn’t been a week since my last one infact it has only been two days. But yesterday was an amazingly fun day and I had a great time so I thought I would mention it here.
The great thing about yesterday was that God was really working amazingly in all the work that we did. The cafe was really great fun, we started at our new start time of 7.30pm and finished at close to 9.45pm. There were loads of guys there and we had great fun. One of the guys had brought along his ipod and we have ipod speakers in the cafe. He had the beatles on and his friends told him to switch off the beatles but instead I said no lets not switch off the beatles and we listened to beatles songs for well over half an hour it was amazing fun.
We had some new games at the cafe too. Hayley had brought along Jenga which we played loads of times. Hayley and I had gone out to do some detached work, which basically means we were walking around the street to see if we could invite anyone to the cafe. We had wanted to find some playing cards too but we could only find snap and happy families so we bought both. Many games were played of both they were enjoyed very much.
I got reminded how important it is to pray for things. We needed to talk to speak to someone quite urgently and had tried a few times. We then prayed about it and as if my magic the next time we called she answered. When we pray coincidences happen.
We also had a good few games of one of the greatest games ever, shut the box! I managed to shut the box for the first time ever, I must have played that game hundreds of times! If you have never played it you should buy it. I heard its only £2.99 in Home Bargains or was it B&M Bargains. One shop with the bargain in that is only found in the north of England!
After we finished at the cafe we went to an open mic night set to listen to some music.James had brought his guitar along to Renovate cafe to play with one of the lads who had come a previous week. So when we arrived we decided that me and him would go up and would sing the song Elvis isn’t dead (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kIp1AkQdfk) which we had been practicing as we are planning on going busking in town at some point. Then afterwards we were about to go off stage and then we decided we’d sing Postman pat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJdaJ_cyRS0&feature=youtu.be&a) which we had sung at Ignite only a few days ago. To quote a comment on youtube on the postman pat video by Bubblebursting “lol? too funny” How can you not watch the video with a glowing review like that!
On the way home I got to town and just as I got off the bus to switch buses and the bus I need pulled out of the bus stop it was the last bus of the day. The kind bus driver stopped and let us on even though he wasn’t at the stop. Aren’t bus drivers great, it probably isn’t one of the most fun jobs in the world but they are really great people. Sure you get a few that are grumpy and unhelpful but you do in all jobs. Its great seeing the drivers and getting to know their faces. There is a great driver who has a beard on the 3 route he is amazing there are too many great drivers!
Finally got home at 11.45pm
What a day!
Thanks for reading
you rock!
4th March 2010
It seems a bit strange that it is March already and I still nearly w! It doesn’t feel that long ago that it was Christmas and my birthday. I was thinking we only have just over 4 months until we finish for the summer. There is so much to do before then though.
I really feel that it is so important that we get some of the young people that come along to Renovate Cafe coming along to Renovate Life Church. It is vital that people coming along to churches get integrated into a new church well so that they know lots of people and not just the youth worker. This means that if a youth worker was to leave the church then there is a better chance that the youth will stay. If they only have one connection to the church through the youth worker then they will be a lot more likely to leave when the youth worker goes. I am not sure where I will be or what I will be doing next year so it is important that this happens soon. I am sure that God will want this too.
Had a good run for the first time in a long time. I don’t know whether it is ok that it was running round the living room for about 20 minutes but it was whilst playing Wii fit. Did loads of running thought it would be good to try and get my fitness up. I’m doing a fun run in May so I think i’d better be ready for that. My calves are killing when I walk now. Guess I need to do it more regularly!
Watched England on tv yesterday they were playing Egypt it was a dull first half and I was quite pleased to get a phone call during the game as an excuse to miss the first half. I wanted England to bring on some of the players for England including Peter Crouch. Peter Crouch is a tall player he is 6 foot 7, and he has a great record of scoring goals for England but he seems to be mainly playing as a sub recently for England if that. But he was brought on and scored 2 goals and we won 3-1. The second half was a lot better. Really great. I don’t usually enjoy watching England friendlies but this was enjoyable especially as we won!
I was in charge of sorting out a team social for us today. I am a huge fan of the BBC tv show Bargain hunt. For those of you who don’t know the show there are two teams who get £200 to spend on items at a car boot sale then they sell them at auction and the team with the biggest profit wins. I thought it would be fun as a multitrack team if me, James and Sandra had a go. We had £5 each to spend, the original plan was to sell the items on Ebay. I suggested we went to a charity shop near where we work in Revoe, little did we know that it was closing down that day and we managed to get probably 30 or 40 VHS videos with our money. They also had some paintings so James got some really nice big paintings. I was given a box of smaller paintings for £1. Sandra went for the option of books to go with her videos. Although it isn’t that long a walk to get to Sandras house it felt such a long way as we were all of us carrying heavy boxes. But it was amazing fun. I think we probably have about 5 videos of Notting Hill now between us. Can you have too many videos of Notting Hill? I’m not sure. I really like the film and have been told on numerous occasions that I am like Hugh Grant in that film, I guess awkward and stutter a lot! We gave up on the ebay idea but apparently there is a table top sale at St Marks in Layton we are hoping that they might let us sell some videos, paintings and books along with the tabletops that are being sold.
Thanks for reading again! You are great!
28th February 2010
Have moved back to the house of Daniels today. Having been at an apartment in Ginn Square for 8 weeks. It was really nice being so close to the see, but it is really good to be somewhere that has a proper internet connection! I miss the internet and my phone is getting annoyed with me for being on youtube so much. Renovate Cafe was really good this week, we had at least 30 people come in. Had some great conversations with the young peeps that came. Most of them come from the local school Lytham High.
Watched Alice in Wonderland this week, the old Disney one. I am sure that I have seen it before but it must have been when I was 6 or something as I didn’t remember any of it. It was really good but I was gutted that it was just a dream that sort of cancels out all the story really! Takes away the magic. Always spoils a story when it says it was just a dream or they somehow make it back to how it was before. But apart from that it was great. I wanted to see it before watching the new one with Johnny Depp. Watched Jonathon Ross the other day and Depp was on it. Ross said that he thought it was the best acting Depp had done. My favourite of his was when he was in Sweeney Todd. I think I need to watch Edward Scissorhands that is an old but it looked like a great film.
Had a day learning about Alpha yesterday, was really interesting and learnt a lot about how Renovate could run an Alpha course and how I could help with Alpha in the future too. Alpha is a great course and has brought so many people to know about God and become Christians.
Have improved slightly at Skateboarding. I can now comfortably do a push off and then stand on it and then do another push and carry on. I can’t quite do three in a row but will keep on practicing.
After posting last weeks blog I went to Sandra and Hannahs house and watched Home Alone it is one of the best films ever I love it! I won’t do a big post about that because I already did that further down the blog! After that we went to a fire festival in Blackpool town centre loads of fire everywhere it was really fantastic!
Well that’s about it for this week! Thanks for reading again. Check out other parts of the Website. Its an awesome website and it has loads of information about Renovate.
As always you can contact me at Robwfc@aol.com i’m on Skype robwfc I’m on twitter www.twitter.com/robwfc and on facebook too. Thanks for reading! you are great.
20 February 2010
Its been a busy week this week. I have been in Burnley at the M4 swap conference with Pais. Its a conference for all Pais workers as well as young people from the churches represented by Pais and also other people involved in youth work in our areas. We took 7 girls from one of our churches which was really great. We learnt so much from various speakers. Paul Gibbs the founder of Pais gave loads of talks which were about how we can improve our youth work, they were amazing talks and I feel like I have learnt loads from it.
God did amazing things in this conference, including healing a young lad who had problems where he would stop breathing whilst sleeping seemed to be healed of this as he had slept 3 hours or less for months and managed to get a full night sleep this week which was awesome!
We got told about some exciting updates with Pais Globally as well as Pais in GB.
Just found a great little Cafe called Barista and it serves the best vanilla milkshakes ever! It has WIFI which is really useful so that I can finally update my blog which i haven’t done in weeks.
I have a week left now at Ginn Square and am moving back to Poulton Le Fylde where I was before. Now over half way through my time at Pais. Its going by so quick!
Contact me at Robwfc@aol.com i’m on Skype robwfc I’m on twitter www.twitter.com/robwfc and on facebook too. Thanks for reading! you are great.
09 February 2010
Renovate Cafe this week was really good. I chatted with some of the young people about Skateboarding, I was being shown how to do Ollies and Kickflips. I don’t think that I’ll be able to do them for a while, I have to practice normal skateboarding. We played Zombies which is a game where you hide and then have to get back to a base before getting caught. Alex was in the Hotseat, she got asked lots of questions. After the cafe we were going to go to an open mic night at another cafe but as we went in there was there was a guy who was feeling ill and was unconscious, an ambulance had been called. So we decided to go outside and pray with one of the youth. Then soon after a guy came out from the cafe and said that the guy was feeling better. Which was a real answer to prayer and really amazing that the guy from our youth witnessed it.
I just had a thought I started writing this blog and the bit above was probably about an hours work, we got a bit distracted, can’t quite remember how but it was good fun. James and I spent most of the day singing as we have a plan to do busking in Blackpool at some point. We have songs ranging from I gotta a Brand New Combine Harvester to Wonderwall with many songs inbetween! We have 2 songs from Robin Hood too which is an amazing film. We got to watch it today as a social! But I thought I have talked about what I get up to a lot and realise that is what a blog is for but I thought I talk a little bit about the 5 and a bit months that I have had with Pais so far.
It has been really great to be part of such an amazing organisation. It was amazing to find an organisation that fitted what I wanted so amazingly. An organisation where you would just do youth work and not sit in a classroom for hours hearing the best way to handle it. The best way to get experience is to do things in my opinion. I am not saying that is the only way but it works best for me. I was really hoping to be placed in Canada for this year but God had other ideas and steered me towards the North of England and to Blackpool. It was great because I knew Blackpool was where God had wanted me. It is just so perfect now the whole team at Pais Blackpool is just fantastic and we all work together so well. The multitrack team led by James with Me and Sandra works really well too. We all have different styles of working but they complement each other really well. I think we have a good amount of work mixed in with a good amount of fun which is ideal for me!
Being up north is amazing too, I was a bit worried being a southerner but it’s been really good to get up north and learned new phrases like “Wanna brew” Although sometimes it seems strange when you switch on the tv to get the North West news rather than South Today but then I see Gordon Burns hosting the news and it all feels right, although I do miss Sally Taylor and Fred Dineage on South Today and Meridian .
Renovate Life Church is the perfect church for me it is modern and has great people there. The church currently doesn’t have a permanent building to call its own but the YMCA is great at the moment and we are still hoping to get “The Island” building that used to house the church back again. The church is lead by Ann Strickland who is an amazing leader of the church and inspires me and others in our day to day lives in her talks and just chatting to her in general.
I have also had the opportunity to live in 2 different areas of Blackpool. Poulton Le Fylde with Lisa and Phil which is a really lovely place and they are such an amazing couple of people and it has been great living with them and I look forward to heading back there in a few weeks. I have also lived in the Ginn Square area of Blackpool which is right by the sea and this has been on my own which has been really amazing too. It has been great to have a late night walk along the prom every now and again!
I have learnt a lot so far, how to deal with aggressive children, working with youth and loads of other things. I feel like I have really learnt how to relate to youth from all different sorts of backgrounds which is really great. I think we get to see between 50 and 70 young people a week through the youth groups and then going into school we get to see a load more too.
I don’t really know who reads this blog some people have mentioned to me that they have read it, but if you are reading this and thinking you would really enjoy working with youth or kids in a Christian environment and give a year to God give me a shout and i’ll recommend Pais to you!
I still think no one has commented on this page. Maybe you can’t I don’t know. Maybe you have and I can’t read it. But anywho if you want to comment then please feel free! You can also email me robwfc@aol.com follow my updates on twitter www.twitter.com/robwfc there are sometimes picture updates on the twitter page too, if you aren’t on twitter it doesn’t matter you don’t need to be a member of twitter to look at the page. Thanks for reading, I really appreciate it! God Bless.
4th February 2010
Another week has passed! Its been a good one this week. Had an amazing weekend, I went to London to see my friend Luarence and we watched wrestling at Wembley Arena. It was really amazing! But I guess wrestling is one of those things that most people just don’t understand. By the way I know its fake 
. On Sunday I watched 3 films in one day after a night bus back from London got me home at 5am. I watched Home Alone 1 and Home Alone 2 both amazing films with loads of really interesting bits about relationships with other people. For example Kevin the main character was scared of the next door neighbour because his brother had said he was a murderer. But then when he actually met him in a church he was a really nice person and in the end saved him from a really bad situation. Kevin also gave him some advice and it turned out to be really amazing for the guy and really helped his life change. He is also a real pain in both films to his parents but they still love him and try to get home as soon as they realised he was missing. A bit like the story of the lost sheep in the bible. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2015:3-7%20&version=NIV
We had a great meal out as a team on Thursday of last week. We went to St Annes to an Italian food place it was really great food and was really cheap as well. We were slightly intimidated by the guy serving us but apart from that it was great.
We had a fusion type event on Sunday where we a we met up at Anns appartment and played games and chatted. We only really played one game and that was a murder game where you had to work out which player had been selected as the murderer and which person was a detective it was really fun and it is definately going to be played at Renovate Cafe!
The downside of this week was really bad toothache but having been to the dentist and taking antibiotics I think it is improving now which is good!
We had an amazing time at Renovate Cafe this week we played loads of new games and lots of new lads game along. We played a few games and had a really great time. It was amazing.
26th January 2010
This week has been really good for Pais and Renovate! With Pais we got into a school to help out in RE lessons on Monday afternoons which was really good. Our first session there was yesterday. We talked about Hinduism and the story of Rama and Sitta, it was very interesting. The year 9’s acted out the story some in modern day versions and some sticking to the original story.
Had a good week in Southampton saw loads of friends and the funeral for my Grandma was really great and a really great celebration of her life. It was really great that all the family could make it to the funeral and got to see loads of people that I hadn’t seen in years.
On Friday we had our first Light theatre group which was really good, we did some singing, acting and dancing. We met at Mayfield school which is where Alex’s church meets. Then we had the Renovate Cafe and Garden Street Eaterie. We didn’t have many young people there but we had some really great conversations with those that did come along. We had “Hotseat” which was great fun I got interrogated by the others that were there and got asked many questions. It was really good. I got asked questions like What is your worst habit? Which celebrity would you like to meet? It was really good fun. We have a different person in the hot seat each week. One of the young people also went in the hot seat.
We had Splash on Saturday which I had organised. We had a photo treasure hunt. We had clues and had to take pictures of the clue. It was really great fun. Team 1 was led by James and Hayley, team 2 by Sam and Sandra, team 3 by Alex and Hannah. James and Hayley’s team won and got a box of Heroes as their prize! We had a prayer hour in Revoe which was a really good and loads of people came along to pray for the towns of St Annes and Blackpool. The day was slightly spoilt by the football which was happening at Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road where my team Watford lost to Blackpool 3-2 which was quite annoying especially as Watford were winning 2-1 just before the end. I had really wanted to go but was quite glad that I didn’t.
On Sunday I had church which was really good fun and watched the FA Cup football matches that were on tv. I was quite pleased that Stoke beat Arsenal and wished that Scunthorpe could have beat Man City.
January 18th 2010
Have had to head down south for my Grandmas funeral, so am in Southampton until Thursday. Was hoping that my phone would let me do the blog from it on the train journey down. But sadly my phone didn’t want to let me. There wasn’t hardly any reception from Reading to Southampton either which was quite annoying. I played lots of games of tetris on my phone instead. I bet there are some people reading that don’t know what tetris is. That makes me feel old!
Speaking of old I am now 26 not quite sure how that happened but I think it might have been that it was my birthday last Saturday. We went out as a team to The Shovel which was really great. I thought i’d treat myself with a mixed grill. Yummers! Got lots of chocolate and sweets, i am not sure how people knew that was what I like.
I have moved house too. I am now living in Gynn square which is right by the prom. So I live about 20 seconds from the water. Really nice. If the trams were working then I would be able to get a tram to work, but sadly they aren’t working until easter and I think I will have moved out by then. We’ll see. Had a house warming party with all the Pais guys. We played Wii and watched my signed Tim Vine DVD he is one of the funny comedians ever and what is great is that he doesn’t swear and he is a Christian. He goes to the same church as my friend so last year I got the DVD and a birthday card from him which was the best present ever as he has been my favorite comedian for a long time. I was slightly worried that I might have to call an ambulance whilst watching it. Lots of the team were laughing incredibly hard!
Hope you are having an amazing new year!
You can check out www.twitter.com/robwfc to see what I am up to.
January 7th 2010
Back in Blackpool, St Annes, Poulton-Le-Fylde, Revoe and Layton! Its good to be back!
Got the coach from Southampton at 9pm on Sunday Night and got into Blackpool at 8am, I had to be sat next to the guy who spread his legs really wide and snored really loudly didn’t I. I was advised that I wouldn’t need earplugs just before I left too. Oh well!
Tuesday we had snow which was really great! All the Pais team had lunch together, had Cornish pasties and chips! Really good, nice and southern too. We went out and played snowballs with some of the local young people which was fun afterwards. I went for no snowball throwing and it ended up that that was a good way not to get so many thrown at me. Probably meant that some of the girls got more snowballs than they should have done though. In the evening I watched some wrestling which is one of my favorite things to watch. It was the return of Hulk Hogan as well as a few other big names in wrestling to the company called Total Nonstop Action Wrestling. For a wrestling fan it was super exciting! To everyone else I guess you don’t really care!
Wednesday was quite a sad day as my Grandma died and went to be with the Lord. I was given the day off work and thought that I would have some fun whilst remembering the great things that she had done whilst being alive. It was really great 2 weeks before we were playing on my Wii on Wii Fit and we got her to play on the slalom skiing game by standing on the wii fit board and leaning from side to side to get between the flags, she did really well at it and beat the rest of my family at Wii bowling. I can’t imagine there are too many 91 year old wii bowling experts! I went and had some fun as I’d been given the day off. Went to feed the ducks in St Annes which was really brilliant! I love feeding the ducks, so many ducks all in the same place trying to get the bread really good fun. Then I went to the beach and the beach had snow on it. It has been something that I have always wanted to do, to go on a beach when it is a snowy beach and it was really amazing fun! I have a picture from the best site in the world twitpic http://twitpic.com/wx087 taken from my camera. When I went home I watched Back to the Future 2 which is one of my favourite films probably along with Back to the Future 1 and 3
Thursday has been a good fun day. We had worship this morning with James on Guitar and then this afternoon Sandra and Hannah bought 2 goldfish for their house which was great fun. We played some fun games after that! Then this evening has been a Lazy one. I played on a computer game I used to play ages ago Railroad tycoon 2. Great game.
I was rebelling against facebook for a good couple of weeks. It’s nice to know you don’t need facebook to live, who knew! So you can see what I am up to there as well as seeing what I am up to on twitter. www.twitter.com/robwfc you don’t even have to follow me you can just look at it when you fancy but twitter is a great site!
Have a great week. Thanks for spending some time reading what I’ve been up to. Have a great week yourself. Also have a good look at the Renovate website, it’s a really great site!
God Bless!
January 1st 2010
Its been a long time since I posted have been back home in Southampton! Just about managed to get home despite the snow and ice in Blackpool! Had a great snowball fight with youth from Ignite and Hayley which was great fun, then got the coach back to London with Hannah and then a train from London to Eastleigh then a car journey from Eastleigh to Home.
Went to see my brother on 22nd December went back up to Reading on the train. He had built 2 amazing snowmen which were a lot bigger than him and he is 6 Foot 7. We had a great party for my brothers Birthday. Sadly not as many people turned up as hoped but the snow was really bad there.
Have had a brilliant time celebrating the New Year and more importantly Christmas here. There were 11 of us for Lunch on Christmas day we had a really good meal with our Cousins and Uncle and Aunty and the rest of our family.
Has been really great to catch up with everyone back at home, see everyone at Church and just see how things have changed in Southampton since I left. I do love “The North” but down south is great too.
I got a Wii Fit for Christmas to go with the Wii that I got just before Christmas. I think I could do with getting a bit fitter especially as I am supposed to be doing a run later in the year. Can’t quite remember how long the fun is but if it is further than 200 metres I don’t think I could do it at the moment.
Celebrated the new year in Bursledon playing Xbox and watching DVD’s then heading out at 12 to see fireworks. Saw a really strange sight which was orange blobs going across the sky coming from the ground going really high and really slowly then going through the sky for a while and then it went down and we couldn’t see it. They didn’t make any noise or anything and they weren’t the remnents of a firework. It was really strange. I guess it was a flare or something, Good thing I don’t believe in UFO’s!
The only places to read about what I am upto are Twitter and this blog. No Facebook for a bit. www.twitter.com/robwfc
Hope you have a fantastic 2010. Happy New Year! I finish with a question.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind ? Should old acquaintance be forgot, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne?
December 20th 2009
Its not long now until the greatest time of the year! Where we celebrate Christ Jesus being born into the world about 2009 years ago! Amazing. Have been to a few Carol concerts, two schools, Mayfield and Leyton. My highlight was singing Calypso Carol at Mayfield and Holy night at Leyton both amazing Christmas songs.
We had a great time at the Renovate Cafe on Friday we had 20 to 30 young people come in. It was really good. We had loads of new guys, with loads of great conversations and it was great to have Phil and Hannah from Renovate come along too. Hannah was painting nails which went really well as usual. We had chips and loads of party food it was great. I had a great experience whilst queueing or cueing for the Chip shop we had been there for a couple of minutes when Snooker Legend Stephen Hendry walked in. I was ridiculously excited, our conversation didn’t stretch much beyond talking about gloves but was still amazing.
Had a great trip to Southport on Thursday as a Pais Blackpool social, we ended up at an an amazing arcade place which had really old machines that you had to put old pennies into. There was an amazing one that had Sooty, Sweep and Soo playing instruments of Nursery Rhymes with Harry Corbett introducing it. I used that one 3 times was amazing!
Bought a few books this week, I think it was 54 books which is rather exciting! 43 Mr Men books, 1 Thomas the tank engine books and some Enid Blyton books. I am going back to my Childhood again!
Hope you all have an amazing Christmas! Thanks again for reading!
If you wanna catch up with what it is happening at Renovate Life Church check the website or twitter http://www.twitter.com/renovatelife or if you want to here what I am up to check out http://www.twitter.com/robwfc
December 13th 2009
St Anne’s is buzzing at the moment in expectation of Christmas! I was in St Annes square where there were loads of Churches from St Annes yesterday singing Carols in the square lead by Steve Moss from Fylde Christian Service Church. It was really great. Whilst the Renovate choir was in Lytham singing. The Renovate Cafe was a great success on Friday, we had about 25 people come through the doors of the Garden Street Eatery. We had amazing conversations, getting loads of people coming along regularly now which is really awesome. The usual style of the Friday nights is getting to the cafe and having biscuits, cake and squashes with games of cards, chess and the game that everyone seems to love Shut the box, which alas I haven’t managed to play yet but am eager to learn how to play it next week.
After Caroling on Saturday Alex from Pais and I went to a local cafe to see Ben who helps us at the Cafe on Fridays at his Cafe in St Annes. In the cafe were a couple of young lads who started teaching me how to skateboard, had a go and then got taken to “The Grind” in St Annes and got myself a skateboard, having been playing around with it over the last couple of days it is great fun! Need to practice.
We had a Pais Christmas party on Saturday too which was really great fun, we had Chicken which was really good cooked by our Amazing hosts for the evening Hannah and Sandra.
Today we have had academy an event where young people from all the churches represented by Pais come together and learn about God. It was really great today we taught them how it is good to be like a salmon and swim against the tide. We were also encouraging them to bless people they didn’t know.
Have been enjoying tweeting this week the Renovate twitter account has nearly got 1200 followers now which is brilliant. If you haven’t checked out the twitter page its www.twitter.com/renovatelife
This is the last week before Christmas hols start now so Monday 21st am heading to London on the bus and am trying to work out if I am going to stay with brother James in Reading for his Birthday or Southampton to go home and then go to Reading! So many descisions! Hope you are excited about Christmas and have at least started on your christmas shopping. I have seen the saying “Jesus is the reason for the season” a lot recently, I think its great! still no comments on this blog be the 1st! God Bless. Thanks for reading!
December 8th 2009
I have come to realise that I like starting blogs with so, It isn’t a great word to start with it doesn’t really mean much does it I could have just started talking. Anywho whats been happening this week I guess you might be asking, well the major thing we did this week was a “Spirituality day” at St Georges School, It was really good fun we got into the school at 8.50am and started lessons at 9am. We were going to teach them 3 Christmas songs to sing at the end of a day at assembly. We started with a warm up song of 12 days of Christmas. Then the girls in year 8 learnt silent night with a verse of Stille Nacht (The original German version) taught by Sandra, they also did sign language to some of the english verses it was really good. The boys learnt Tonight by Graham Kendrick and even replaced Kendricks Bridge in the song with a better one! Then they all sung I wish it could be Christmas everyday. They sung really well at the assembly too.
We had youth group at the Cafe this week which was amazing. So many people came along. I think at least 25 people came into the cafe at some point if not a lot a more. We played loads of games with them. Our own Hannah Hocking painted some of the girls nails too which was a real hit. It was fantastic to see so many people, God really blessed us this week.
I got a new Toy this week which was very exciting, I got a Wii, I have had a few games of wii tennis and wii bowling. I am not so good at the Wii Bowling but I think I am ok at Tennis, Lisa beat me at Baseball she was losing 7-1 and managed to beat me.
This Sunday was a great day at Renovate lots of people came along to the Church with new faces. Really looking forward to working with one of the new guys who came along. I think he will be great to help us on Fridays nights. We had a big lunch at Anns too.
All in all a good week! Only 17 days until Christmas too!
Thanks for reading again! You are great! Have an amazing week. God Bless
December 1st 2009
So I was thinking there are a few things that happened recently that I forgot to mention as well as loads of cool stuff that happened with Renovate this week too!
I went back to Southampton on 21st November which was really good, I got to see all the team that I went to Siberia with as we had a reunion at Go Ape in New Forest but sadly I couldn’t go to that, but we met up for lunch afterwards which was really amazing and great to remember all the amazing times we had there. I got to see loads of people from church and got to go Highfield Church too and Tim Billington was speaking and he is such an amazing speaker and an amazing person and I got to have coffee with him afterwards too which was brilliant. I also got to celebrate my Mums birthday with a lunch out too and see my Grandma too! One of my highlights was playing Wii with the children that I was a “Manny” for, they beat me easily at skiing but it was still great fun!
This weekend just gone we had a Renovate Conference Day with Guest speakers Alistair (Ali) Kent for the men and Kate Kent for the Ladies. I was obviously with Ali he did 2 talks and Phil Daniels did one whilst Alan Hocking did one too. It was really brilliant the topic was “Expect more”. We reconvened later on at Anns Appartment for food as it was our minister Anns 21st Birthday I think it was 21st anyway.
On the Sunday Ali and Kate spoke at church and we had fusion in the evening. It was really good especially as 2 of the young people from the Friday café came along and seemed to have a really good time. We had 43 people come along including Alex and Sandra. I got to sing Tie Me Kangaroo Down sport by Rolf Harris. I think the Australian accent was really bad but I did try.
Oh I realise I forgot that we had a great time on the Thursday it was Thanksgiving! We had a thanksgiving meal at Hannah and Sandras house, Alex did most of the cooking but Carolyn made the stuffing for the imitation Turkey (Chicken) but it was amazing! We sung the American national anthem too, but I was the only non American who knew the words. Its a great song.
Anyways thanks for reading! I am trying to make these once a week but I am failing! I will post when something exciting happens.
You can follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/robwfc and follow renovate life church at www.twitter.com/renovatelife Have a great week! Happy December
26th November 2009
So I realise I have forgotten to post a blog for a couple of Saturdays now, so I thought I would tell you about what has happened since the last blog! So the Revoe youth group was a bit disrupted but the week after it was amazing and there was loads of productive conversations. Then yesterday we had to shut the group at 7.30 instead of 8.30 because the children were being aggressive. We managed to get everyone to leave at 9.30 after they were trying to get back into the building by throwing bricks, rocks, sticks and spitting through the letterbox and yielding penknives through the letter box too as well as Swearing at leaders and writing graffiti outside the church! Then the kids that were still inside were throwing everything on the floor and were also being aggressive. Whilst other children had climbed over a fence to get around to the back of church and were knocking things over and causing mess. So I guess you think that was a fairly awful, unpleasant, dreadful youth group with naughty, rude, disobedient kids, well that’s no t the case. During the evening we had to take lots of children to one side and chat to them and we got to speak to lots of them about ways they should behave and why reacting with aggression isn’t good. Other leaders got to share their testimonies with some of the children. We got to explain to others that we really cared for them. So even though it was a really tough week and there was lots of negatives, there were so many more positives! But these positives probably wouldn’t have been able to happen if it wasn’t for the negatives! God was protecting the building, God protected us, God gave us great opportunities to speak to children! So all in all it was an amazing tonight! Praise God!
Renovate youth group is really great too.We have had a steady average of about 8 young people every week which is really good. A couple of the lads have been coming regularly too which is really good!
7th November 2009
It gets harder and harder to remember what I have been up to! I have a bad memory sometimes. Well lets start with Sunday and work our way forward that seems like the logical way to do things. So Sunday we had church at YMCA as usual which was really good, we had Hayley Blundell who is kinda my big boss talking to us and there. The main talk was done by Lisa Daniels and her question was Who or what prevents YOU from being what God intended YOU to be? After the service I had lunch at the Squirrel Carvery with Hayley, James, Sam and Alex from my team which was really good fun. On Monday we had the first ever “The switch” group at New Life Church in Revo which is the church that Pais Blackpool works from and is the church that Sandra attends. We had 6 young people come along which was really great we mainly played games and things like that with them which was good fun. Tuesday was Ignite which as always was great, my hair was played with as you will be able to see from the photo above and I promised I would put it as my facebook picture and add a picture of it to this page too. Wednesday was a nice relaxed day not much happening. Thursday was firework night which was good fun, we had planned to go to a display but I didn’t make it there due to Buses not turning up which was a tad annoying. Friday was the Renovate youth group which was fantastic despite the cold, wet weather we managed to get a few young people to come and play some games in Lindas Cafe. Other exciting news was that our plan to buy the Island entertainment place (where church used to be) was written about in the Blackpool Gazzette http://bit.ly/3Ny6Vg and in the Lytham St Anne Express too. We had 133 people look at the website on Thursday too. Saturday night we had vision night (which was an idea Zac had) where we watched a film at Ann’s apartment it was really great fun! We ate loads of popcorn and sweets! Please pray about the developments with us trying to purchase the Island! Have an amazing week. Thanks for reading about what I’ve been up to! God Bless
31st October
So another week has gone by, its gone by quick, Scarily quick (Scarily being my one and only reference to Halloween today!) So on Sunday Renovate Life Church hosted Fusion! A variety show including Music, Poetry, Magic and Comedy. It was a really good fun night. 38 people were at Ann’s appartment for the evenings events. I was hosting and was part of the “comedy” section. James , Sandra from Pais Blackpool and I did a Dr Dr joke section which I think went ok. Monday went to Blackpool Zoo with Alex on Pais Blackpool and Jennifer from Pais Weymouth and Portland. That was really good fun seeing all the animals and things. Then went to the Hockings house to pick up my bike for the next day and cycled 4 miles before Phil Hocking gave me a lift the rest of the way home.
So there sponsored bike ride happened on Tuesday. It was a 40 mile trek to Burnley, Hayley’s bike broke and my bike had some gear problems but we all got there in the end after a 10 hour cycle all a little worse for wear.
The reason we had gone to Burnley was for Pais’s fresh confrence. Which was really good especially as we got to meet up with all the other Pais teams again. Learnt a lot and had some really good talks my favourite was by regular blog reader of this blog so I found out in the session Jonny Foster! He talked about all the Social Medias, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube! Thats my kind of talk. There were lots of good talks from Richard and Sophie Mcguinness, Pete and Bryony Baker and Matt Brunton. Also whilst in Burnley went to watch the new Fantastic Mr Fox film that was interesting but quite a long way from the book. I found it really funny though. Thankfully the ride back to Blackpool was a lot easier we got a life back in Hayleys mums car. Back in Blackpool now! Hoping for another exciting week. Thanks to everyone who is reading this! You are great.
Blackpool to Burnley Bike ride!
Thanks to everyone who sponsored me for the bike ride!
It went really well and it was really great to have accomplished it.
I am avoiding bikes for the time being though!
Thanks again
Rob
[paypal-donation]25th October
So another week has flown by! 2 months until Christmas! So we had a great social day on Wednesday with games including, Trapped, Countdown, X Factor Who wants to be a Millionaire and Cooking. I was paired with Sam and we won the X Factor singing Cauliflowers Fluffy a great song! Sam won the Trapped game and we drew with Alex and Carolyn on the Countdown! A great fun day.
Today we had a reunion for children who had taken part in a production done at St Marks Church. It was a really great afternoon, everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. Have done the usual detached work. The Renovate youth group had 7 young people at it on Friday, we think the sudden drop was due to it being half term and this was the last day of term.
Had a great social outting today when Alex from (Pais Blackpool), Jennifer and Hayley (Pais Weymouth ) Franzi who was (on Pais last year) Fil and Ben went to the Toby Carvery next to the Island. which was really great. Felt really fat after it though.
So this coming week am off to Burnley with a cycle ride up there which should be fun! You can still sponsor me if you’d like to, link on the main website under blogs and Rob Butler. Hopefully going to Blackpool Zoo on Monday too. We’ll see. Anyways have a great week will tell you all about Burnley next week. God Bless
18th October 2009
Hello! Rob here again, was a super amazing week this week. Have done some amazing detached work, firstly in Revoe where we played football with the kids there. This was really amazing especially as it had been a bit aggressive and violent in the previous 2 weeks, this week it was really calm and everyone really enjoyed the football. There was also 2 girls playing which was really good as we had only had boys in the previous week. Then in St Annes for Renovate on Friday, we played football with loads of lads and we had about 9 a side at one point and most of these guys and some other ones came into the Garden Street Eaterie Cafe across the road we had 25 young people in there and then had some other people who couldn’t get in because there weren’t enough seats. Hopefully some of the young people are going to be coming along to church, I’ll let you know next week!
On Thursday we had Leadership Academy with Richard Glynn from www.buzzfactory.co.uk. which was really good, we learnt so many things about Public Relations and how to best use the media.
Church at the YMCA was really amazing too we had amazing worship with Alison Hocking! With an amazing inspire from Phil and great singing for Irene. We also had 3 ladies from Atlanta who have been doing singing in Blackpool tommorow! Check out this site for tickets. (http://bit.ly/1yudfd)Looking forward to the coming week! Keep checking out the website! I’ll blog again next Saturday! If you want more information or want to ask a question about what i’m up to or what the church is up to, leave a comment on this page or send a message through the main church website!
10th October 2009
Hi! I’m Rob the Pais Youth Worker for Renovate Life Church!
I am from Southampton, Hampshire and have just moved to Blackpool after having 3 weeks of training in Burnley. I am working for Pais Project (http://bit.ly/2XNonT) and will be working in local schools around the Blackpool area.
I will be helping with 3 youth groups. At St Marks’ Ignite group in Layton, The Switch at New Life Community Church Revoe and our very own group The Life Lounge at Renovate Life Church! Both Ignite and Life Lounge will be detached work which means that we will be going around the areas of St Annes and Revoe and finding young people and then bringing them along to youth group and have a relaxing time with them. Sit relax and chat and build friendships with the young people. We have met some really great young people so far. We will be going into schools after half term. I will be working at Renovate Life Church for the academic year wherever that may be.
We are currently a “Homeless Church” as there was a problem with the building we were in (The Island) have a look here (http://bit.ly/LaSf5) We really felt like this place was a great home of our church and are really hoping that we can buy The Island which is an “Impossible” task. Thankfully we are Christians who believe nothing is Impossible through God and we believe we won’t be a homeless church for much longer. In the mean time we will be meeting for Church at the YMCA in St Annes. That will start tomorrow.
If you want to follow what’s happening at Renovate Life Church then you can either look at the church website or you can look at the twitter page which is www.twitter.com/renovatelife
I shall be attempting to update the blog every Saturday!
God Bless!
Outnumbered is amazing!
Gaither is amazing!
Pais:Weymouth&Portland is amazing!
Just want to say what a great blog you got here!
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Thumbs up, and keep it going!
Cheers
Christian,
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Great blog Rob, enjoyed having you with us and reading your blog.
God bless Audrey x
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