Minted!

In November young people from across the diocese gathered to receive their grants from the Youth Evangelism Fund. The Minted event was a chance for young people to present their plans for the money and hear all the exciting things which other groups were going to get up to. In total the groups won nearly £16,000 towards sharing their faith with young people in innovative ways. See overleaf for further details of the fantastic projects which are going on.

The evening opened with music from Vision 33 the band of young people from Kempsey who received £1000 to fund their work visiting other groups of young people to share their music and their faith with them. One such group they have been visiting is the Ronkswood group called Dunno who also put in a successful bid for £500 to fund some Tshirts for them to wear when they are doing work in their community so that people will know who they are and why they’re doing the work they’re doing. We were presented with some great videos and photo presentations of the work of various other groups such as the young people from The Venue in Malvern Wells who also won £1500 for their young people to explore their faith further as many of them come from non-churched backgrounds. The Bridge Project in Headless Cross in Redditch also won £500 funding each for two projects; their expressive arts group and their evening worship for young people by young people. Christchurch in Lye won nearly £500 to refurbish their fantastic youth cafe the Vine and Branches. St Mary's, Longdon also won funding to take their non-churched members away together with their Christian young people to help those young Christians share their faith with their friends. The small group of young people from YPC at the Church of the Ascension in Malvern who got £1000 to set up their youth space at church and one of them shares some of what’s been happening:

"At YPC we have been wanting to form a youth group for a while. Now because we are getting more people and have recently won a £1000 Youth Evangelism Fund grant we can now make what we hope to be a very successful youth group. We have got the Chill Zone tent to welcome people with. We have just bought a shuffleboard game which is great fun. We are also hoping to buy with the grant money a good sound system that will blast out cool music. We have also found in the boiler room two pool tables that haven’t been used for a long time. Apparently we have a table tennis table somewhere that we are hoping to use for the youth group as well. The main reason that we are hoping to do a youth group is to invite people into the church and show them that it is a good place to be. "TC

It wasn’t just individual churches who won some of the funding. Upton deanery won £1000 towards an event with Saltmine drama group and the Worcester Diocesan Youth Council got grants for Rock the Cathedral and for faith sharing materials for various events with young people across the diocese. Worcester University Chaplaincy received £1000 to help set up the base of their brand new post of full time chaplain and help with evangelism with students from all over the world through Bibles in different languages. Bids variedgreatly in amounts from the smallest— St Mary the Virgin Hanbury also got funding for their Open the Book project in their local school, being granted all of their very modest bid for £129.87 towards book resources– to the greatest which went to the band Formal Affair which will be working with the Youth Council to work in schools and youth groups. They won £3000 towards amplification equipment and a video camera to make evangelistic videos for podcasts pen drives of videos, music and bible studies to share faith with young people through innovative multimedia.