Well, it’s the last week of the lecture phase here at the DTS. It’s been a busy past three weeks and it started with Mark Sampson coming in from London to speak on Christian worldview. He talked about how the Bible is relevant to every culture and every society. He also talked about how knowing about the creation story and knowing about the book of revelations prepares us for how we are to live in the here and now. That week we also had our Albanian presentations. We had split the trainees into groups and gave them each a different sphere to focus on. The ones who had food actually made a traditional Albanian meal. This week also marked the last week that we had went to Batchwood for our local outreach. We had been going to a local club in Hertfordshire and handing out tea, coffee and hot chocolate till early in the morning. There had been lots of good conversation with the people at the club there in telling people of why we are up at 2am handing out hot drinks.

Last week, the January DTS headed to Wrexham, Wales for a DTS gathering. They used to be run by the Forever team as a way of preparing for the Olympics. DTS’s from all over the UK, Scotland and Wales would come to an Olympic city for a week of teachings on evangelism and then practical application of different kinds of street evangelism. This week, we handed out hot chocolate in the snow, worshipped on the streets, made snow art, and had a snowball fight with youth. It was amazing to get to know students from other YWAM bases and to have a go at outreach before leaving next week for the ‘official’ outreach phase.

Now we’re here for the last week of the DTS and we have the national YWAM England leader, Carl Tinnion, speaking on purpose, calling and destiny. It has been a really good shift as we’re heading into outreach to now be even more outwards focused and looking forward to the full time outreach. The Liverpool team leaves on Saturday to go to an Easter camp near Bath, UK for a week and the Newcastle team leaves after Easter weekend to go work with a pioneering YWAM team up north.