November update

Hi! 
Here is an update I made end of november. 

London, november 2011

Hello,

As you know, I have been living in London for 3 months now. Time for an update!

It will be very similar to my previous letter, where I explained what I expected this year to look like. Let’s compare how close those predictions were to the real London GAP-life.

June 2011 The idea is to serve there as a full-time Kairos Gapper. Here is a short explanation. GAP? Never heard of it… “The practical and spiritual lessons of this past year will be of use for a lifetime.” Kairos GAP is more than a year out. It is a year of your life invested in service, training and mentoring. Service The gappers typically spend around six hours a day in some kind of Christian volunteer service capacity.  This could be serving the desperately poor living on the rubbish dumps of Manila or speaking to college students in Minnesota about Jesus Christ.  It could be helping with a youth outreach in Latin America or running a street mission in inner city Dublin. Training Over the course of the year, the average gapper spends around 400 hours exploring training from life skill topics such as self-management and intercultural awareness to more discipleship topics such as service and scripture.  Given that a normal college class can take around 40 hours of your time, the GAP year is a bit like 10 classes over a year.  The high training input that goes on in the year is the reason why many gappers point to their GAP year as a foundational year of service and learning impacting the rest of their lives. Indeed one of the most valued aspects of the year is the space to develop and think about longer term vision for life. (http://www.kairos-eme.org/Training/GAP/Vision) More specific GAP in Londen: My service will mostly be in Koinonia. This is a mission which reaches university students in London. (Similar to Pharos here in Leuven.) Less than 1% of London’s university students attend a Church once a month. London was identified in a recent study as being one of the loneliest places in the UK. There is a desperate need for Christian community to be built amongst students.  (According to the GAP-director in London) Most of my work will be reaching out to students in London to tell them about Christ. Alongside the evangelism I will be involved with some administrative tasks for Koinonia, helping out with some youth work in community (Antioch) and a few other service opportunities. The training consists of:  Evangelisation Scripture study project management Local mission – improving as a mission worker Contact If you have any questions, please ask! Sincerely, Marie-Sophie Vanderstuyft more info about GAP: http://www.kairos-eme.org/Training/GAP more info about Koinonia: http://site.koinonia.co.uk./

November 2011 Gapping is a full time job, I’m telling you… Here is a long explanation. Gap? Yes, I heard of it in june… I feel like I have been learning a lot in the last 3 months. And I know for fact that this will be of good use later on. It is such a great experience to be able to serve, get some training, help to build God’s dream without having to worry about anything else like studies or other obligations. Service We typically spend 24 hours a day working for Koinonia (the local Pharos) and the Antioch community. I really enjoy the work with students. Most of this time is meeting up with new people, doing coffee stalls, preparing our Thursday nights, having students over for housedinners, cooking meals for our social events, meeting up with the gap-ers, etc. In Antioch I am helping out with the youthgirls from 11-13 year old. They are fantastic! Training This year London started a new project called Mission school. We are the guinea-pigs. This means that we get a lot of training. Four mornings a week are spent in mission training. We focus on general evangelism, Scripture, our local mission and project management skills. General evangelism covers books like ‘Searching issues’- Nicky Gumbel ‘Questioning evangelism’ – Randy Newman Scripture studies are mostly the Psalms course. Where we look at different characters of God through the psalms. Our local mission handles questions like How and why do we do coffee stalls?, how do we work as a team? Etc. Project management skills train us to lead a more effective life. I am now an expert in google calendars, google documents and making mindmaps. Well… I should be. Next to that we’re involved in the ‘underway-group’ of the community which is called TPC. So we are getting a lot of those teachings too J Very intense, but very instructive. à true à It is incredible how open people here are to ‘start a friendship’. London really is a lonely city. I feel like Koinonia has seen some very explicit things happen already. A few people clearly gave their lives to the Lord and a lot of people were open to meet up with us over coffees. We started a new project where we asked the students if they wanted to commit for a year to Koinonia. Thinking that it would be nice to have a small core group of people where we can count on. God did the unexpected. Except for 2 people all the other students said they wanted to do the commitment. So for now we have at least 11 students committed to Koinonia and more are coming up. It really is an answered prayer! à I’m not involved in the administration, more in pastoral care and leading a household à yep! Contact Please stay in contact if you have any questions or if you want to give me an update on your lives. I would love to get these! And you can always check my blog: www.msgoeslondon.blogspot.com Marie-Sophie