Last year we were at the Soul Survivor festival with our respective youth groups when Mike Pilavachi announced a new mission initiative to take young people to the streets of Durban, South Africa in 2009. This sparked an interest in both of us as we have both travelled and been involved with churches that have strong mission connections. However 2009 seemed a long way off and we decided that we would try and get some of our teenagers off on short term mission much sooner than that, this summer in fact.
On a damp Autumn day we sat in a cafe discussing the idea and realised that money was always going to be a factor in teenagers being able to participate in overseas work. We had a dig around and found out that it was difficult to do a short-term trip for less than about £600, and with many organisations it would be over £1000, just inaccessable to some people. At this moment the madness set in! Ben is an Australian and was eager to see Britain; we both cycle a bit and it's easy to make decisions over a cup of coffee in a nice warm café! So, "Two Boys on Bikes" was born, a trip from Lands End to John O'Groats to raise money to help fund teenagers on short term mission.
The upshot of this is that for the last two weeks of April we rode the 1000 miles raising about £5000. We stayed with people from churches along the way, Ben having cold-called vicars, ministers and pastors to get us accommodation. We arrived at John O'Groats at 2pm on Friday 28th April having got wet only twice along the whole journey. This summer Ben is taking the first group of six people to Bulgaria and we are now looking at which projects to get invoved with next year. If you want to read some of our daily reports from the trip they are all on our site at www.twoboysonbikes.co.uk and keep looking, the idea for an even bigger trip is already brewing.
With thanks to Ben Webb and Dirk Vermaak - two church-based youth workers in the Loughborough area.
