During our Sunday service on 9th April, we celebrated everything Helen Edwards has achieved during her time as our church youth worker, as she is about to start maternity leave. We also prayed in Naomi Ryan as her temporary replacement.
We have been greatly blessed over the past three years to have Helen Edwards as a part-time church youth worker.
Helen has been instrumental in the growth and development of our youth and community work. Since she took over leadership of the Friday and Sunday youth work, we have seen the groups that we are working with regularly triple in size and become much more engaged with the journey of faith that we are all on together.
Alongside these main groups Helen has successfully established a youth small group which meets once a month in Ushaw Moor, a discipleship program for young people which is now available to every young person at Emmanuel over the age of 11, Christmas and Easter ‘Journey’ experiences for Silvertree school in Ushaw Moor and other example of one-off events such as The Big Night out and Newday trips and treating streams such as the Relate Course.
Helen has challenged the way we engage with our young people and has successfully put more emphasis and responsibility for their journey of Faith on the young people themselves through this we have seen a number of our youth commit and re-commit their lives to Christ and get baptised.
There have been other projects as well including Detached Youthwork and a Youth Cafe in Ushaw Moor and extensive support of the God Loves projects in our communities.