For two  hours, a group of guys sang in the showers.  Why?  Three of them had surrendered their lives to Jesus at the Saturday night rally of State Youth Games 2015.  For Chelsea Cullen, part of the pastoral team at Dalkeith Road, this was unexpected and totally wonderful.  “I could hear the most beautiful music: the boys singing Amazing Grace in perfect harmonies.  It was really echo-y in there, so I think they thought they sounded pretty awesome as well!”

The story behind this celebration is just as awesome.  For two years, Chelsea and her small group of friends have been praying.  For the most part, it’s just been a core group of five who wanted to see their church grow.  So they began praying for a heart to love their church.  Then they prayed for hearts to love people into their church.  Someone found a trophy that Dalkeith Road had won back in 1999.  “We had a sport culture in our church in the past so we reckoned that we should get involved in State Youth Games again.”  The call went out on social media and through friendship networks and before they knew it, there was a team of 35 plus 2 volunteers.

“Like with the bus, it was pretty cool”, said Chelsea.  “The only bus we could get just happened to be a 35 seat bus.  We didn’t think we would be able to get that many people, but in the end we were all squashed in with our luggage on top of us!”

Chelsea was also concerned that because people didn’t know each other that it would be hard for the team to ‘gel’.  But she discovered that like everything else about this team, God was at work bringing everyone and everything together.

Chelsea and her friends are now focused on keeping the connections going.  “We take our responsibility seriously.  We are doing everything that we can to stay in touch and continue to build on the relationships that we formed over the weekend but at the same time, we know that God has got this!”

“My dream is to see young people become disciples of Jesus and not just attenders of a church.  I want to see them again at SYG and to see their friends come along too.  I want them to be able to stand there at the Saturday night rally and say to their friends, “I got saved here last year!”  That’s the flow that I want to see: people being saved and then seeing their friends saved too.”