Heres HOPE

Chapter
1
Relationships Rule
Flo had already said, ‘I think you are going to
do this – it’s got you all over it.’ It offered me
the opportunity to be entrepreneurial and I felt
that God had been preparing me. Why wouldn’t
I want to use what I’d learned about mission and
relationships? That’s what I felt God spoke to me
about in taking it on. It gave me an avenue to
mobilise hundreds of Christians to be evangelists
to the nation; to put mission on the agenda in
every church. I realised we could never repeat
HOPE 08, but we could serve the Church in its
mission to love and serve its community. We had
no office – nothing. They couldn’t commit to pay
me. It was crazy. I was to raise everything to make
it happen including my own salary. Youth for Christ
had given me a sabbatical year so I said ‘Yes’.
WE STARTED IN 2010.
RELATIONSHIPS
WERE GOING TO BE
TO ALL WE DID.
KEY
Iknew that we needed to build on the
relationships we’d made, and to extend them to
the two groups that we hadn’t engaged with: the
black, Asian and minority it ethnic (BAME) churches
h
and the Catholics. In our naivety we’d put a big
bold statement out there with HOPE 08 saying
we’d mobilise the whole Church for a whole year.
The Theos evaluation pointed out that we didn’t
quite achieve that, so that was a key goal as I took
on the job. We didn’t realise how big the whole
Church is. We thought of the whole Church as
those in our little camp. Now we had a fresh
mandate to go for the goal of mobilising the
whole Church for mission.
32