Ever since I was little, I had always enjoyed fellowship with all my friends at church. By the time I entered high school, I was even more eager to join a school fellowship. Unfortunately, my school didn”t have a fellowship and so I made it my personal mission to start a fellowship at my school. Due to the lack of my determination and the growing amount of homework in my first two years of high school, the idea of a fellowship actually began conceiving during my grade eleventh year. Personally, I think that it wasn”t a bad idea to start in Grade 11 because I was able to maintain my overall grades, become more familiar with the school environment and people, and I also met my future fellowship”s partner, Sam.
I met Sam during one of my ARTs field trips. I was in the visual art department and Sam was in the music department. Sam happened to sit beside me during the bus ride and by the time we arrived at our destination, I got to know that Sam was a dedicated Christian and served faithfully at his church just like me. I was really excited to meet another Christian who held similar values as me and we continued to keep in contact after the trip. During the start of second semester, Sam asked me if I wanted to join him in starting a fellowship with a bunch of his friends. His invitation reminded me of my vision to start a fellowship at the beginning of Grade 11 and I immediately accepted it.
In the process of creating this fellowship, I signed up for a course called “Running a Christian Fellowship in High School” at Teens Conference. At the end of the course, the teacher invited us to visit another event called “AFC (Ambassadors For Christ ) Connect”. Through this event, it led us to “connect” and worship with other school fellowships in the YRDSB district. A month before my exams began, I went to visit Sam”s church and spent some time with his fellowship. It was truly a new experience for me because it was my first time attending other church. That night, we studied Hebrews 1 and Nathan, the pastor, talked about how Jesus could not have just been a prophet and whether the Word of God is the actual truth. The point of this bible study was learning how to wrestle with our faith and developing our own purposes for believing in Christ. Overall the night was not heavily based on the bible study, but mostly involved a lot of interactive activities. We talked to Nathan about our school fellowship and he recommend some helpful advice from the time he started his fellowship at his secondary school. Nathan didn”t teach us where to start or give us any tips to lure people into our fellowship. He recommended us to not choose leaders based on how they appear or how they label themselves as Christians. Nathan said that we should choose leaders based on their ability to teach the Gospel clearly and their ability to be available to others. He also shared with us about how difficult it would be when we begin the fellowship, so that is why we must be accountable for each other first. Ultimately, despite the size of the fellowship or our own ability to handle the size, we should be prepared that people would drop out for whatever circumstances and we can’t always do something about that. However, they would know where we stand in our faith and might come to us again whenever they are troubled with their faith or just curious about Christianity.
Throughout this entire journey of building my school fellowship, I can really see how God has worked in it. Since my first idea of creating a school fellowship, to finding my partner, to finding my sponsor teacher, and in submitting the new club proposal form at the office. Even when there were times when things aren”t going in the way I want it to be, I felt that God had been with us in every step and encouraging us through the people we had met and the events we had attended. This also helped me grow spiritually as a leader and strengthened my faith in the Lord. Ever since I was little, I had always enjoyed fellowship with all my friends at church. Now that I am older, I want others to have this experience too.
