Flicker...

Saturday saw the arrival of a long anticipated event called flicker. Back in February we did the first one, opening up Gloucester Cathedral for youth in the county to come along and pray in creative and thought provoking ways. It’s one of the events that takes a load of effort but is so worth it – it brings some of the biggest focussed youth initiatives to one place to work together, and its works very well.

This time round, our theme was advent, which is such a wonderful and inspiring theme. I hadn’t known before.

The thing that permeates throughout advent is the idea of waiting. So we created different waiting rooms in the upper gallery areas of the cathedral, symbolising the 4 key themes of advent itself.

1. Preparing. Recognising our extreme need for God, that He alone can save us. That, though we do not deserve him, he brings glimmers of hope in places of bleakness.

2. Jesus’ Birth. The celebration of God coming to earth as a man. God did something about our need for a right relationship with him. In our helplessness, there born was a Saviour.

3. God’s presence now. As well as celebrating the fact that Christ was born, we also long for him to live in us, to work through us. The classic Christmas carol ‘o Little town of Bethlehem’ puts it brilliant – “o come to us, abide in us, be born is us today”

4. Jesus’ coming Kingdom. We look with hope to the future of Christ’s return in glory. His everlasting kingdom’s rule, when we shall see him and worship him in fullness and wonder.

The last room was something we put together and was great fun. We made a ceiling using rope and hung loads of Christmas decorations from them. We had different stations encouraging people to celebrate the Lord and had different things to impact all the senses. To finish, we had hundreds of party poppers to pop in an ‘amen’ response to the challenge of going out with joy, to share the gift of Christmas with our families and friends.

A really cool evening.