Gavin Calver: God is not done with Britain yet

That was the message from Gavin Calver to thousands of Christians at Spring Harvest last night.

In a humorous and often poignant address, the Youth For Christ director opened up about some of the personal challenges he has encountered in his life.

Although the 31-year-old is happily married with two children, the past five years have seen both valleys and peaks. Around five years ago, he and his wife were told they could not have children, only to discover one month later that his wife was pregnant with their first child, Amelie. Their second child, however, died in the womb, and their third child, Daniel, was given only a five per cent chance of surviving by doctors. Against all odds, he survived.

For Calver, when people face a hard situation, the question is not so much ‘why is this happening?’, but whether God will be allowed to enter into that situation.

“When we thought we couldn’t have babies, where was God bringing order out of chaos? We pushed into him and we met him and he brought good news,” he said.

“When we lost our baby, where was God bringing order out of chaos? He was there alongside us, not solving it, but bringing context and bringing hope.”

He said the reason so many people could not see any order in their chaos was because they left God out of it.

“Until you involve God in things, it seems so chaotic. No matter what you are facing, it’s not that [something difficult] doesn’t happen with God, but with God there is an order to the difficulty.

“Whatever your life looks like right now, don’t compare to others but allow God to bring order to your chaos.”

Calvin also spoke honestly about the challenges of leading a ministry when so many people in Britain are turning away from Christianity.

“When you preach the Gospel you are in the rejection ministry. For every person who says ‘yes, you are right,’ 10 say you are wrong,” he said.

He shared his encounter with one particularly troubled 12-year-old who had participated in a one week YFC residential. ‘Mickey’ was continually cussing, fighting the other kids, and even pulled a penknife on Calver at one point and threatened to injure him.

Yet when it came to the last night of the week, when Calver preached the Gospel and invited the young people to accept Jesus into their lives, it was Mickey who stood up.

Six weeks later, his youth worker emailed Calver with the news that he and Mickey were feeling frustrated that the last four in the group had still not given their lives to Jesus.

“The thing is, when you get the leader or you get the Samaritan woman or the Mickey, they go home and get their village,” he said.

“We have to believe that God can bring life out of nothing. In your town, maybe it seems like there’s nothing. He wants to breathe life into that nothing. In your town maybe there’s life; he wants more.

“But we as a church need to start hoping, believing and praying for more because I am not prepared to accept the recent stat I read that in two generations time the church will be considered in the past tense in this nation.

“That is not going to happen. God is not done with this island yet. He can breathe life into nothing.”

Calver suggested that the church start really believing that the Christian faith is all about life, rather than accepting decline as inevitable.

“We’ve done something incredible as a church in this nation. We have taken the most awe-inspiring, life altering, non-politically correct, dangerous leader the world has ever known … and we have made this church boring.

“We need to take this church and make it relevant. And relevance isn’t always fancy gadgets. Just love people.

“As the church we need to do a better PR on ourselves. What other group would write books like ‘one generation from extinction’ about themselves? We need to start speaking ourselves up and believing that this great God can breathe life into nothing today.”

Calver admitted it was “terrible” that there were one million NEETS in Britain – young people “not in education, employment or training” - but said it was God, more than jobs, that these young people were in need of.

He encouraged Christians to believe that even the smallest of actions could have a big impact when used by God.

He gave the example of a letter he recently wrote to June Brown, the actress who plays devout Christian Dot Cotton in popular soap, Eastenders.

In the letter, Calver thanked Brown, who is a Christian in real life, for being such a good role model to young people. Around four weeks ago, he received a phone call back from the actress in which she told him about the difference his letter had made.

Just recently, the soap’s scriptwriters had written in some lines for her character in relation to the controversial baby swap plot which she felt would make the Christian faith look stupid.

She photocopied Calvin’s letter and sent it to each of the soap’s scriptwriters and asked them how they could make her faith look stupid when she had received this letter telling her what a good role model she was for young people. As a result, the scriptwriters changed the script and portrayed Christianity in a positive way instead.

Pointing to the feeding of the five thousand, Calver said: “Why don’t we start doing little to see God doing loads. He can take a letter and change a soap opera for 10 million [people].”