Six of the Smile and Mega kids club team went to Brooklyn New York to spend a week at the Metro Ministries "boot camp".

This entailed 6 days of working alongside the metro team learning and picking up ideas that we could use back home.

Bill Wilson says " it is better to raise up boys and girls , than to repair men and women". With this in mind we prayfully dedicated ourselves to reaching all children 12 and under in Colchester and beyond with the gospel of Jesus.

We heard numerous testimonies about how as children these people had gone to "yogi bear" saturday sunday school and received the love of Jesus , but in their teens they had got into serious problems in life and at some point on their journey they had turned back to Jesus because that seed had been planted in them from a young age and it started to grow.

The week consisted of really practical work from going out "blitzing" which is delivering leaflets advertising metro to home visits.

The home visits were powerful and really looked into the young peoples lives and how they survived.Gang ridden streets and broken up apartment blocks left young people vulnerable and scared, as children, most of them had seen enough violence to last 3 life times. But each week a glimmer of hope comes to their door and that is the Metro workers with an invitation to saturday sunday school. The childrens faces light up with excitement and you can see the power of the Gospel working in their lives, reaching them.

A fleet of buses head out of the Bushwick area to pick up some 6000 children over the course of 1 day(6 sunday schools), this is an amazing experience riding the buses with these fantastic kids and hearing their stories.

Metro Ministries also does a project called "side walk" - this means they send out 16 small fully equipped vans into areas around New York and do a Mega kids club style teaching on the streets. Each van does 3 per day for 3 days per week before they start gearing up for the saturday outreach, this altogether reaches 20,000 children per week (not including all the adults who watch and listen). This truly is an amazing ministry and Bill Wilson is an amazing man. Jesus is at the centre of everything they do.

For more information go to their website WWW.METROMINISTRIES.ORG or read Bill's books : Who's child is this? or Christianity in the cross hairs.

I'll get you butler!!! - John plays "on the buses"

A huge thank you to all at Metro for the great week, To John, Ella, Beth, Lauren and the kiddster for being such a great fun team to go away with.

By The Dunge.