
New Day, New Surprises
1. The ingenuity of the production team. After being told at the last minute that the Big Top would not be available due to staffing shortages, the Newday team had four days to figure out what they were going to do, and how they were going to assemble a festival stage in the middle of summer when all of the usual options are already booked. The results were astonishing. Six thousand teenagers in a field (inevitably christened the Big Topless), all of whom were able to see everything, hear every word and experience it all under a sunset sky.
2. The speed with which teenagers adjust. As the first song begins on the opening night, you look around and wonder whether corporate worship is going to work in this setting, with no roof, no darkness, and an absence of three years meaning that many of the young people know none of the songs and look slightly startled by the scale of things. An hour and a half later, those same teenagers are raising their hands, jumping for joy and singing their hearts out, and many of them have streamed to the front to respond to the gospel for the first time.
3. The lengths that 12-14s will go to if it means they will get on the stage. If you’ve never seen the wonder that is I’d Do Anything, then you haven’t seen youth events as they are meant to be.
4. The seamlessness of the transition to the next generation of leaders. Present company excepted, it’s hard to think of a single person on the main stage who would have been there in 2015. Ben Rowe’s leadership of the event, Rebekah Walker’s hosting, the preaching from Joe Macnamara, TJ Koleoso, Taylor Bentliff and Daniel Macleod, the worship leading from the teams at King’s London and KCC Hedge End (and that’s without mentioning the similar handovers taking place in operations, pastoral care, seminars and so forth). I’m sure there were places when it didn’t feel seamless, but given the scale of that shift in the last few years, it is astonishing how well that was done.
5. The humility of the serving teams. I find it amazing when people take a week off work to go camping with teenagers and cook for them in incredibly sweaty conditions. Or look after young children. Or fix technical problems, or serve coffee, or operate machinery, or clean. At one point I saw a friend of mine with a huge grin on her face, and then noticed the rubber gloves she was wearing. She told me that when she came in 2019 she had seen the toilet block, and resolved that she would join the cleaning team at the next Newday. She was true to her word. So were hundreds of other people.
6. The length of time that young people will queue for a milkshake. (It took me 45 minutes in the Cowshed. The results, admittedly, were amazing.)
7. The range and extent of the sporting activities. I always thought it was volleyball and water fights; I hadn’t realised how many hundreds of kids were playing in football, dodgeball, basketball, rounders, netball, rugby and who knows how many other competitions, nor how eager they all were to beat Jubilee Church London (the undisputed favourites in virtually every event). Playing the finals in the dark after the main meeting was a masterstroke.
8. The cohesion of Newfrontiers. Newday is one of only a handful of events that gathers people from right across the Newfrontiers family in the UK (and often beyond), and it is much the largest. So it serves as a beautiful microcosm of what the movement is at its best: biblically robust, spiritually passionate, beautifully diverse, unapologetically prayerful, evangelistically fervent and relationally warm. It is not perfect, any more than we are; any youth leader will tell you that. But it is delightful.
9. The quality of the youth workers. Leading teenagers at an event like Newday requires a very tricky combination of energy, humour, spiritual resilience, physical stamina and pastoral wisdom. It is not at all unusual to see a youth leader laying down the law about behaviour on day one, praying for teenagers to be filled with the Spirit on day two, working through a complex safeguarding issue on day three, leading a Bible study on day four, and volunteering to be slapped in the face with a fajita on day five. (If you know, you know.) Extraordinary.
10. The goodness of God. You can see it in the weather, the number of people who responded to the gospel for the first time, the pouring out of the Spirit, the number of physical healings, the personal encounters with God from six year olds to sixty year olds, and the truths that the young people were listening to and singing about. God is good, all the time. I never want to stop being surprised by that.
What a week. Roll on next year.