More than 300 members of HTB in their 20s and 30s attended the church’s ‘Emerge’ weekend at Chichester last month.

Guest speaker was Mark Russell (pictured right), the youngest-ever Chief Executive of the Church Army.

Along with worship led by Tim Hughes and the HTB band, there was also an evening party with an ‘Apres-ski’ theme, featuring a snowboarding simulator machine.

On the Sunday morning, Nicky and Pippa Gumbel and Ken Costa (fresh from the Economic Forum in Davos) were interviewed by Archie Coates and Tim Hughes.

Mark Russell, who was appointed to his post at the Church Army in 2006 when he was 31, said, ‘The reason why I wanted to be here – and I was so excited when Nicky asked me – is because I want to encourage you to be a generation of young leaders who let God out of the box that the rest of the church will put him in.

‘One of the phrases that Rowan Williams uses is that he says “Mission is discovering what God is up to in the world and joining in”.

His morning talk was about vision and why it is so crucial in our lives.
In the afternoon he spoke about the need to be ‘a radical, white hot disciple of Jesus Christ’.

‘If you put those two things together – vision and white hot radical discipleship – you’ll blow the world apart,’ he said.

In his interview, Nicky Gumbel spoke frankly about the vision of the church.

He said, ‘The expression that keeps coming into my mind is “It’s time to accelerate”.

‘I feel like we’ve been in a bit of a traffic jam during the last year.

‘A couple of years ago we went to New Wine and it was a really hot day and the motorway actually melted and as a result, we couldn’t move for nine hours. It was so frustrating.

‘And last year I felt a bit like we were all sitting on a motorway, desperate to move forward...

‘But now the combination of reopening St Paul’s earlier than we would have done and the purchase of Cromwell Road, which will free up the space that we need both at HTB and St Paul’s, has meant that now we can actually accelerate. We’re on the open road again and the traffic’s beginning to move.’

Ken Costa said the church needed to stop having ‘debates amongst ourselves’ while ‘shrinking into a grouping of irrelevance at precisely the time when we need to go forward.’