Pioneering something new in Whitley Bay

How a small Friday night team prepared the ground and watched God bring young people through the door.

There is something beautiful about watching a seed take root. In Whitley Bay, a small team gathered for six weeks of training before they had even met a single young person. They learned skills, yes, but more importantly they learned each other, sharing stories, building trust and preparing their hearts for whatever God might do. All that preparation for something that did not yet exist was, in itself, an act of faith.

Then came the evening of the light party. An hour before the doors were due to open, there was a knock at the door: teenagers looking for sweets who had stumbled upon a lit-up church. The team invited them back, offered hotdogs and table tennis, then spent the next hour praying. Would they return? Half an hour into the party, there they were, with friends in tow.

Two weeks later, when Limitless Whitley Bay officially launched, it was not those same teenagers who showed up first. Six different young people walked through the doors, young people nobody had met before. And they kept coming back. The following week, one of them brought a friend.

It is still early. The numbers are small. But there is a quiet electricity in it all, a sense that something is beginning. A team that barely knew each other now stands together, watching young people choose to return week after week. Parents are starting to linger at pickup, conversations forming. A church that was once quiet on Friday nights is filling with laughter and the clatter of pool balls.

Nobody knows yet what this will become. That is the beauty of beginnings. They are full of possibility. And in Whitley Bay, a community is learning what it means to prepare the ground, open the doors and trust that God will bring the growth.

This article was first featured in the Your Elim newsletter. You can read the Your Elim newsletter here, and sign up to the newsletter here.