Welcome to the new “Focus : into the mix” Website
This is the online community space for those of you who attend FOCUS each month and also for those of you who are just looking – tell us how far away from the UK you are!
Email us your comments and thoughts about what you see here and we’ll post the best ones up on the site somewhere.
Email your name and address and we’ll send you one of our really cheesy Focus Keyrings or magnets – ooooooohhhh!
We’re in the process of putting this site together so some of the pages may have limited functionality, but we’ll try to get things up and going as soon as we can.
Here’s what going down on the site……
Visit: the blog; forum chat space to start a conversation topic; see into the future with our events page; read or leave a music review; post us your quirky images in “PhotoBooth” and there will be a monthly prize given out at Focus for the best one…….and much, much more.
OK! So just what is Focus?
“Focus – Into the Mix” is a monthly gathering of young people from in and around Stafford who attend local church youth clubs and churches.
Focus has been part of the Youth work scene in Stafford now for about 35 years. During this time it has had many different faces, and the chances are, if you are a teenager who’s family has always lived in Stafford, that your mum and dad might have attended once……..when they weren’t as old as they are now!
But don’t worry it’s changed since then and 2006 sees it being re-developed afresh, with some exciting new things happening!
At the moment we are keeping Focus as a once a month event that happens on the 2nd Sunday evening of each month from 8 – 9.30pm. There’s a break during the summer (August) and a possible weekend event that happens at the end of the summer term.
In the new year we are hoping to introduce some new things and maybe even do some extra, ‘weekend-long events’. These will include sport, workshops, social action etc, etc…..so keep a eye out for what’s going on!
If you believed everything you read in the local and national newspapers, you’d think that most young people are anti-social, disrespectful, hooded criminal Yobs, but at Focus and MSYN we believe that young people are of great value and can have an amazing impact for good on the communities around them, whether they profess a Christian faith or not, and that the NEWS often distorts how young people really are!
As a Christian youth trust, MSYN has at the centre of its work the role of telling young people about the way lives have and can be transformed by Jesus Christ. At Focus we also make it a priority to find out, together, where Jesus fits into our lives and world as we try to do all the normal things like getting on with parents and siblings, our education at school, college or future University, our relationships with friends, what we watch, listen to and fill our time with; in short how we can live as Christians when Focus isn’t on or we aren’t at church!
One way we want to do this in 2006 and beyond is through this new online community Website. Even if you aren’t able to attend Focus each month, (or maybe you’re getting withdrawal symptoms, cos you enjoy it so much) we want you to continue exploring the things we do at Focus, through the chat-space, forums, blogs, reviews and helpful material, that you and us post on the website. We hope that as it grows this will provide a space for you to express your world as you see it and explore what is means to be a Christian and what impact you can have on those around you.