Last week, that young woman was at the Norfolk Showground with teenage children of her own, speaking in a seminar stream as Newday turned twenty. It was a very different experience. The weather was glorious - warm in the day, cool in the evening - and nobody was evacuated or wrapped in foil. The number of people on site was more than three times as large as in 2004, with just under 10,000 in attendance. At the risk of reducing young people to statistics, there were 553 first time responses to the gospel and 534 healing testimony cards filled out, to say nothing of the thousands who encountered God in fresh ways. The majority of the main stage speakers and worship leaders last week were young teens themselves when Newday started; at least three of them would not even have become Christians yet. Most of the leaders of the 2004 event were still there in 2024, but in supporting roles: co-oordinating prayer meetings, typing out programmes, meeting with trustees, praying for healing, or simply encouraging youth workers. The crowd of people listening to that young woman’s seminar was vastly more diverse than the foil-clad group in Nottinghamshire two decades earlier. Shivering in that leisure centre, she would not have imagined that Newday would still exist twenty years later, let alone be thriving like this. I only know that because two weeks later I married her.

The fact that Newday is the same age as my marriage shapes the way I think about it. I track its progress over time. I see it maturing as an institution, like marriages do, as it learns more and more what it is uniquely called to do, and what it must (sadly) lay down in order to do it as well as possible. I notice the obvious changes in size, activity, diversity, accessibility and leadership, but I also notice the way in which they reflect what Newday always hoped to be. A twentieth anniversary is a good time to observe the differences between who you were and who you are, but it is also a time to celebrate the continuities, and the way in which God has changed you in order to keep his purpose for you the same. So the song lists and musicians have changed, but in order to preserve the exuberance and encounter we have always hoped for. The preachers, topics and seminar titles have changed, but so as to maintain the combination of biblical fidelity, prophetic clarity and evangelistic urgency we started with. We no longer bus young people into football stadiums, but more people respond to the gospel now than they ever did. And so on.

Two things struck me particularly. One is the model of team leadership that has always been a feature, but seems to have become heightened over time. I saw at least eight different people lead out in corporate worship, three men and five women, even though there were only two bands on the stage all week. The only people who preached more than once were the people who did the morning sessions, and neither of us were involved in leading the event. If you asked a group of teenagers which individual was in charge, you would have got several different answers, and none of them would have been right. As one speaker put it on the Wednesday night, there has never been a Mr or Mrs Newday.

The other is something that has never changed, and I hope it never does: the kindness, humility and diligence of the serving teams. It still astonishes me that there are people who take a week off work to come to a campsite in Norfolk to look after my children, and that they are ceaselessly enthusiastic and thoughtful as they go about it. People go out of their way to be helpful as they set up and pack down venues, empty bins, cook meals, fix things, steward venues, oversee safeguarding, care for people with disabilities and run sporting activities, even though they are tired, sweaty and (obviously) unpaid. As ever, it is the cleaning team that amazes me the most. At one point I encountered two individuals - one a hugely talented gospel singer, and the other a pastor with thirty years experience - clothed in luminous jackets and rubber gloves, with huge grins on their faces, telling me about what they had witnessed as they cleaned the toilet blocks that morning. I was as captivated by their joy as I was horrified by their anecdote, and I know similar things could be said of many, many others.

I have no idea how many people have served in such ways over the last twenty years. Someone must have set up the venue for my first seminar. Someone must have given my soon-to-be wife a sheet of foil in that leisure centre. Someone was on the doors when my son made his first response to Jesus, and someone else was on the front gate that day when my daughter lay down in the driveway and refused to move, and someone else had to deal with the pastoral fallout of that public mistake I made. I don’t know any of their names. And despite my desire to honour a great many individuals over the last twenty years, I haven’t used any names in this article, except one. His is the only Name that matters.