Thanks Helen, welcome Naomi!

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.

Children and Youth growth

God is blessing us greatly with growth among our children and young people.

On Sunday 31st January, we heard from our fantastic deacon Pete Gray and youth worker Helen Edwards on what God has been doing, what He's doing now and where we are in faith He will take us in future.

“We are really blessed to be part of a growing family here at Emmanuel. Over the past few years we’ve had more and more children and young people join our Sunday morning groups - we now average 90-100 individuals every week!
We already have an amazing, dedicated children’s and youth work team who give their time to engage and teach the younger half of our congregation. The problem is is that whilst our church as a whole has grown, unfortunately our serving teams have not. In some cases they’ve actually shrunk in numbers.
In order for us to keep investing in our children and young people we really need people to step forward to help with the work we do.
In particular, I’m looking for people to help with our 11-14s on a Sunday morning and our 11-18s Wildfire group on Fridays. These teams currently only have four leaders in total each - and when we need two leaders per session, I’m sure you can see why we’re a little stretched at the moment.
In a time of growth we really want to be pushing forward and expanding rather than thinking that we may have to start cutting back. So I would ask that you would spend some time praying and see if this is something you could spend serving in.
Pete, Ali and I are here to equip and train you to share the Gospel across the age groups and we would be happy to answer any questions that you have about the work the church is doing.”

— Helen Edwards, youth worker