Extreme

 'Extreme' was a vision born out of a number of young people and their youth leaders going to 'Soul in the City', a community outreach and urban regeneration project in London involving thousands of young people across the country.  The idea was to do in Southend, our home, what we had done in London for a week.  Thus 'Extreme' came to be a place where young people from across Southend got together to show their local communities what their generation was all about; generosity, love and acceptance. 

In 2009 Extreme moved into a new format.  We have always maintained that the fundamentals of Extreme should be based around relationship with the young people, community action, and introducing Jesus to them in an accessible way. To maintain a balance between these three aims, we spread Extreme days across the months of April through to October.  There were a maximum of 100 young people at any one Extreme date to make sure we have time to actually talk to them as opposed to yelling instructions over a noise similar to an eruption of Mount Etna!

Community action is still the chosen basis for Extreme's impact on the local surroundings, and we hope to show some of Jesus' love to both the guys and girls in the area, as well as to those who give up their time to serve.  This year we reverted back to a 'Week A', and a 'Week B' format.  'Week A' was between 29th March - 1st April, and 'Week B' was between 6th April - 9th April.  Read on for details! 

Have a look at some photos!

Extreme Reality 2011

The vision behind this year’s Extreme was that it went back to basics! That it went back to the heart and mind behind all the fun and excitement and all the chaos and hype and came back to the reality of JESUS! We believe that this year God asked us to strip everything away and bring it back to the reality of the Gospel, and actually we didn’t have to jazz it up or make it cool, because 2000 years on Jesus still is the coolest guy to ever have walked the earth and if its fun and excitement your after then look to Jesus! If your life lacks some EXTREME living then check him out!

Each day our fab Extremer’s got to split off into groups based around their amazing talents, we had the lovely GLEE girls (and the super lovely James) our arty and crafty group led by the super cool Denise and Luke who worked on 4 fab Graffiti boards! Joining them we also had our amazing Extreme drama crowd, along with the ever so fit and cool sports group (led again by Mr cool himself Bradley Moss). We also had the beautiful girls in hair and beauty bringing some glamour to this year’s Extreme. And adding some scrummy smells (although I never got to sample anything) the Extreme Cookery group, new to this year and im sure defiantly to return! And of course last and by no means least we had Be the Band, probably the coolest people in Shoebury (and im not just saying that because I was in it or because we won the games night of course ha ha. I can hear the shouts of “cheats cheats” from here) thank you guys for providing us with the coolest Extreme song ever! With sooooo much talent at this year’s Extreme the final showcase was totally immense and a fab way to end such a brilliant week!

For so many Extremers’ this year though this wasn’t the end but the beginning of an amazing journey with the coolest guy in history! 38 young people decided that they wanted to ask Jesus into their lives. Each day we looked at amazing truth about ourselves and actually what God thinks about us! We learnt that he has chosen us, that we are no accident or a mistake. We are CHOSEN! We learnt that we are LOVED, with such an unconditional love by such an amazing father. We learnt that we are FORGIVEN, yeah we have all done some bad things but actually God doesn’t hold them against us. And on the last day we learnt how Jesus sets us FREE!