Youth and Community Worker
Hi, my name is Pod (sometimes known as Martin Podmore - but not very often) and I am the Youth and Community Worker for Christ Church.
I was taken on by Christ Church (foolish people!) back in 1998 and ever since I have regularly referred to my role as a "dream job".
In the first few days of coming to the area whilst walking down our street just round the corner from the church I had a very strong sense from God that amazing things would happen in our local community - by that I mean lots of people becoming Christians, being healed, becoming enthusiastic about Jesus and demonstrating His love to all around. That feeling has ebbed and flowed over the last 8 years but it has never disappeared - it's actually what gets me up in the morning, to be honest!
So everything I do in my role as Youth and Community Worker is meant to help make that dream a reality. My particular passion is meeting and loving people who do not yet know Jesus. I try to spend a lot of my time doing that, or praying for those people, or organising stuff which will hopefully help those people to connect with God. Specifically, I help to run our Friday night open youth club (mostly kids not from church families - the little cherubs!), I go into Margaret Wix school and meet up with a small group of wonderful little people and do something called "God4Us", I do stuff with and for men who do not yet know Jesus (like curry nights with Christian speakers), I help with our fantastic Sunday morning Junior Church (Triple G), I have recently become very involved with the running of our Alpha course (I love that, because it's completely aimed at helping non-believers find Jesus - yes!), I help to organise our annual Fun Day (a fabulous opportunity to rub shoulders with loads of local people and show them God's love in practical ways), I am on our church's P.C.C. (Parochial Church Council - it can be a lot more fun than that sounds......honest!), I try to spend quite a lot of my time meeting up with local people (for example, I regularly go to the New Greens Club over the road from the church and chat with people over there, always praying and looking for opportunities to tell them of Jesus' love and pray for/with them) and I do one or two other miscellaneous things, like spending time with our brave and wise leader, Jeremy.
I suppose I could sum up what I think my job is about by saying that I aim to help build a bridge between the community around us and the church/Jesus. My dream is that more and more people will walk both ways across that bridge.
If you do pray, please pray for me that I am able to have more and more courage in letting other people know just how much I love Jesus. And if you are reading this and you don't yet know Jesus I'd love to talk with you.
God Bless, Pod.