Nomad, Christian Community, Mission and the Future of the Church.

Welcome to Nomad podcast, a monthly show in which we five friends living in Nottingham in the UK, myself

Nick, Tim, Hannah, Laura and Michael explore Christian community, mission and the future of the church.

And we're doing that this month in the company of Andy Hawthorne of the Message Trust in Manchester.

Tim will be interviewing him in a moment.

And then later in the show, we're chatting to Sarah Cotton about her experience

of living in community and doing mission in Sheffield.

We're getting this month's podcast underway by having a chat with Andy Hawthorne.

Now Andy is the founder and CEO of the Message Trust, which is a Manchester-based Christian youth charity,

which has pioneered a number of youth initiatives.

These include unique mobile youth centres, dance, music and recording centres,

and programmes delivered to young offends in custody. But we're particularly interested in talking to Andy about the Eden Project, which are long-term community-based youth projects in some of Manchester's

most deprived estates. So it's a real privilege to welcome Andy Hawthorne to Nomad.

Hi, Tim, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm really good, thanks. I was wondering whether you could

begin by briefly describing your journey from what I assume as an average Christian to the leader of a

movement that has transformed hundreds of young lives in some most deprived areas of Manchester.

Well, I don't think there's any

such thing as an average Christian that certainly shouldn't be. When I committed my life to Christ

at 17, and the thing that really got me out of bed in the morning was wanting to tell people

about Jesus, I think God, when I was 17, gave me the heart of an evangelist. And that's

really what's kept me going for the last 30 years. And so, even before I set up my own charity

and started to do in citywide stuff, I was just ducking and diving, trying to tell as many

...