Schoolie celebrations are a significant time in the lives of many Australian young people. It marks an ending but also a new start and with so many young people gathered in a handful of locations, it’s a wonderful moment to give an opportunity to discover Jesus.

The faithful partnership of YFC supporters enabled passionate young Christians to join together at four popular destinations – Surfer’s Paradise, Byron Bay, Lorne and Bali to intentionally demonstrate the love of Christ and make Jesus known.

Altogether 87 volunteers interacted with around seven thousand school leavers in the course of a few weeks. Collectively they demonstrated the united family of Christ and, through hundreds of conversations, gave many an opportunity to become a follower of Jesus.

39 young people made commitments for Christ during the week while hundreds of others heard the Gospel, some for the first time.

SCHOOLIES MOMENTS

The stories below give a small snapshot of the thousands of interactions our team had with Schoolies. Every young person is on a unique journey. Please keep praying for these young lives.

Discovering Jesus

We met a young schoolie at a burger bar in Bali and struck up a conversation with him about life and God. It turns out that he lives very close to one of our team members in Australia.

He explained that he always wanted to know God but never knew how to. He would pray most nights to a God that he didn’t even have a relationship with but had a desire to know.

We were able to share about Jesus and lead him through the process of accepting Jesus into his life and are now in the process of following him up.

39 young people made commitments for Christ during the week while hundreds of others heard the Gospel, some for the first time.

Salvation Belongs to God

Kylie and Krystal were in a shop when they felt prompted to encourage a teenage girl who had just walked in. This opened up an opportunity for conversation.

Eventually the girl explained that the night before she had been drinking and felt thoughts of self-harm. Thankfully, a Red Frogs crew were nearby and had prayed for her. She went on to share how that night she had encountered what she believed was God and woke up ‘different’.

We were then able to be the next step in her journey by sharing about Jesus and His love for her. She was stunned and explained how she had felt drawn to come into the shop we were in. She could see God was leading her to Him.

Footy Boys Discuss the Nature of God

Some of the team were on the beach in Lorne playing spikeball when a group of about eight typical footy boys with drinks in hand, came past to have a look at the game. We invited them to play and they accepted.

When one of them asked what we were doing in Lorne during schoolies we told them that we were there to share the love of Jesus and pray for anyone that wanted prayer. We ended up praying for one of the boys whose back had been injured in footy, with all of the others crowding around thinking we were crazy for suggesting such a thing.

After a quick prayer we asked him to check his back. He stood up and rotated it from side to side. Immediately his jaw dropped and bewilderment flooded his face. He swore loudly and said “the pain has gone!” He had to convince his mates who were trying to comprehend what had happened.

This moment lead into an excellent discussion about the nature of God and one of our guys shared his testimony which the boys listened to intently. None of them wanted to accept Jesus into their lives there and then but at the end of our interaction they all thanked us and shook our hands saying “we would have never imagined this to happen on our first day of schoolies!”