Last week we had a mission in our local secondary school, Faringdon community College. The mission was led by a group called Collective who are a group of three young ladies based in South West England (there are other collective bands around the country). Each morning year group assemblies were taken and then several lessons took place throughout the day, the lessons were in dance, drama, music and RE. each session gave the young people a chance to have some fun but also to explore some issues, things like dance after spending some time learning a routine there was a short chat about how we dance and the differences between what we might see on MTV and the image that is often portrayed through such dance compared with the dance they had been learning and saw the girls performing. Some lessons also gave a chance to ask the panel questions with the one rule being if you can ask the question sensibly, you will get a sensible answer (in other words ask us about anything, nothing was out of bounds but you have to be mature in asking, not goggling cos its a slightly embarrassing subject). This all worked really well and over the week we must have seen somewhere in the region of 600-700 young people in lessons. The week ended with a concert on the Friday night to which we had 130 turn up (this is a good number considering the dispersed nature of the catchment area of the school meaning over 50% of pupils have to be bussed in). the concert ended with a kind of testimony/preach from Nikki one of the band members which was really well presented and very heartfelt and honest, after the talk there was an opportunity to say a pray and come and find out more, we had 52 young people come out at the end to chat which was fantastic and having done the first follow up session this week we had around 30 turn up for that. Exciting times for Faringdon, we pray that this might be the start of something in the school and the town.