serve- tuggeranong
26th April 2010 by Julia Hosking
Skyfire is an annual fireworks show held in March at Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra. The fireworks are synchronised to music played by local radio station FM 104.7 and each year, over 100,000 people attend the event.
Unfortunately, over the years Skyfire has become synonymous with underage binge drinking. In order to try and address this issue, for the past three years the organisers of Skyfire have invited The Salvation Army to provide a presence at Skyfire to engage with youth who are involved with (or at risk of becoming involved with) underage binge drinking.
So on Saturday 20 March from 4:30pm to 9:00pm, a group from Tuggeranong Salvos in their late teens and early twenties hung out at Skyfire.
In order to not just provide a presence, but also engage with the youth, this year, they walked around the site and handed out 960 bottles of water and approximately 1,500 chupa chups to people at Skyfire, the majority of whom were youth.
Most of the youth had been drinking, or were drinking, yet were very receptive to the team. Not only was walking around to hand them water and a lolly effective for engagement, it temporarily broke their drinking behaviour.
But instead of simply handing out a bottle of water and chupa chup and leaving it at that, this year an additional label was placed on the bottle which displayed the MORE logo and a simple message: To experience MORE to life, check out salvos.org.au/more.
The MORE website information was altogether given to 960 people. Maybe everyone will access the site, maybe no-one will, but 960 seeds were planted for Jesus that night, and that's what matters. And God will work with whatever was planted for him.
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Comments
Great idea, love it! Keep up the good work =)
yay tuggeranong :)
love your work gang...
Its amazing how serving others can be so simple and yet so fun!
And who doesnt like fireworks?...
Thanks for sharing your story.
Cheers
It's always really encouraging to hear of youth sharing the gospel. I belive that youth are some of God's greatest instruments for the salvation of others. You guys are such an inspiration.