Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Dave Saunders: I joined the youth organisation, which was like a year out scheme, and I didn't know where
they were going to send me in the country: they could have sent me anywhere, and I was
hoping for somewhere like Cornwall, somewhere really warm and it ended up that they sent
me to Inverness, purely because I had a real passion for asking the question 'What does
church mean for people who are disengaging with church?' And I knew that Inverness was
asking those questions and wanting to plant a youth church at the time, so I came to Inverness.
When I first moved to Inverness and I left home I was first introduced to people outside
of my bubble, my church bubble anyway, realising that there's a whole group of people that
haven't been communicated that there is hope, that there is a God that loves them, and that
really hurt me. I think it came out probably in hatred and anger towards the church, that's
how I felt if I'm honest. I was hurt that people I'd grown to love on the edges, nobody
had bothered -- well, it felt like anyway, nobody had bothered to share with them. It
felt like the church had hidden the greatest truth away from these incredible people.
But at the time, 10 years ago, there didn't seem to be a church that would accommodate
the type of young people that we were working with. It didn't feel right to try and force
them into a mould of typical church, so we formed this youth church called Revolution,
which went on for about 6 years. It was incredible -- really, really powerful times. The transition
from revolution to reverb, and why we changed our name -- I felt that we needed to study
what it meant to be a disciple and I said, 'Look, let's study Luke 10 until we get our
heads round what it really means' and I said I'm not going to write a programme, all I'm
going to do is sit at a long table and buy a bag of chips every Sunday night and we'll
all sit round and say what our thoughts are on what it means to love God and love our
neighbour and what it means when Jesus sent out the 70 or 72, and what lessons we can
learn from the 'sending-ness' of Jesus.
We had about 35 people involved in the youth church and it sort of whittled down to about
10. Some people just wanted to play football and I said, 'Well, ok then, let's play football,
but let's do it on another night.' And we started to meet in homes over meals instead
of a programme led by me, and we picked the name reverb because we wanted to reverberate
something of God's love in the community. We are together trying to live out something
of the culture of God or the kingdom of God, that together we are people of compassion
and forgiveness and hope and love, and that we challenge each other to become better at
that.
One of the things that I found in the Methodist Church is this idea of covenanting with one
another. We, at the time, a few years ago felt this was a really interesting and powerful
thing that we could do together. So again we kind of translated it into our language
and we felt like maybe the covenant is a bit like an invisible bond between us -- something
that holds us together, a strand that holds us together and we study together and reflected
together, and it came out that it expressed itself in our four different relationships
which we identified, which was our relationship with God, our relationship with our neighbour,
our relationship with each other and our relationship with the wider church and what that looks
like.
Somebody asked me, 'Can I come and see reverb?' And I replied, I emailed them back and I said,
sure, no problem... if you've got a couple of months! I tell you what, I'll drive you
to the local hairdressers and introduce to one of our members, I'll drive you to the
high school and introduce you to the teacher who's a part of it because it's them that's
reverb living out their life as they are. So to be a part of reverb, like I said, is
living out a culture, a way of life, and we commit to one another I suppose because we
see each other as family over the dinner table. We might share how great the brilliant opportunities
are to serve our community but it also might be the moments where you can say I've no idea
where God is anymore and the brutal honesty of that, and letting the despair and the hope
sit side by side and it being ok to be like that.
We put an ad in the local newsletter that went to everyone in the community saying,
if you know someone in the community who you think deserves to get their garden done up
you can nominate them and we'll come and do it for you. And so we did that and we got
lots of nominations and for four years we every year went and did three gardens -- it
wasn't three gardens every year actually, it was three gardens one year then two the
next. And we just invited other friends that we as reverb knew, that would help us dig
up a garden and lay some gravel and plants and it was a brilliant opportunity, well it
is a brilliant opportunity just to get to know people in the community and to invite
people on the journey of loving their neighbour. And I think on the journey of loving your
neighbour, on the journey of mission, you can become a disciple, you can find Jesus
on that. I also don't think you can separate them -- mission and discipleship. Discipleship
can happen in mission. I don't really have a huge vision for mega-church -- I have a
vision for small pockets of friends and family getting together to keep each other accountable
and to laugh and cry together.
I've recently been given this opportunity to convert this old shed, stone shed, into
some sort of prayer space -- a space to calm the noise, a space to escape what can sometimes
feel like an unfriendly world. It might just help this community, and myself even as well.
So this space is called 'breathe' because it's about breathing space -- just a moment
to go, 'Ahhh,' you know. So, some guys have walked in and I've just been there and I've
not said a word and they've just felt the space was safe enough to share their life
story. And one guy walked in actually and just felt something really powerful in the
room -- he said it's indescribable what it is, I can't describe it. And I had the privilege
of saying, 'Do you think that might be God?' I'm finding that's happening a lot more. I'm
instead of having to preach it, push it on people, I'm just pointing out that God is
already at work, God is already there, I'm just going, 'Hey, do you think that's Him?'
Reverb is a community of people that welcome anybody, even if you don't have faith, even
if you do have faith, you just try to talk about life and if people are struggling we
try to advise them, let them open up, let them try and be peaceful, get wisdom, and
Dave -- he's great at helping you understand when you're in a bad way and explaining, 'Ask
for, speak to God, ask guidance.' I come in here about once a week -- I just sit and think.
It helps, you know, it really does help a lot of people.
One lad that I'm working with, who's a part of reverb, found God when he was sat in his
flat on his home and remembered 10 years ago a young Christian youth worker, and saw something
in her that he wanted. So he Googles, 'How do I become a Christian?', and finds a prayer
on some website somewhere and prays the prayer seven times over and over again until he felt
something change in his life. And so he felt what he would describe now as the Holy Spirit.
I'm often just absolutely blown away by the church giving me this opportunity and God
picking me, this sort of uneducated Eastbourne boy, to come up to this beautiful city in
the highlands to live out a brilliant dream, and it's a privilege to be a part of that.
That doesn't say it's easy - sometimes I've felt like it's more of a curse than a blessing,
sometimes I've felt like I've been at the point of filling out college application forms
and saying, 'I can't do this anymore, I just want to do something else, I'm not the man
for the job.' But it's the same calling that brings me back every time, and I can't get
away from that. In fact reverb, recently, have been through this stage where it was
so fragile that we weren't sure, 'Is this really working, is this worth continuing with?'
One of the things we really liked about the word reverb is that it starts very, very small
-- this little sound, this little echo and gets larger and larger and larger, but then
it falls off, it disappears. And it's about this pulsing -- we have to start small and
get bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's not in numbers but it's just about this rhythm
of life. So we just felt we'll just start off small again and that's ok, that's where
we at. But I'll tell you this -- I was just ready to give up, you know! It's like a sort
of pride thing I suppose as well, just embarrassment that the church has sponsored me and paid
for me to do this and I haven't given the produce, the goods... I haven't done it for
them and I want to. But the vision is still there, that's the ultimate thing. You ask
yourself, is the vision dead or is it still there? And it was still there.