Airdrie GO Team 2007

Or ‘Jonny goes to Glasgow’ or ‘Ulsterville Gardens on Tour 2007’ or ‘The most hyped GO Team ever’ or ‘The Renwick back 5 and 1 midfielder and 1 striker plus Katherine ‘Token Ginger’ Lyons, Walker ‘Token Baptist’ Walker, Chris ‘Is Kit really the best we could come up with?’ Carson, Rachel ‘Was nearly token girl’ McCollum and of course Willy ‘Bapman’ Tait. Apologies if this is sounding like a Messenger report already.

We arrived in Cairnryan on Wednesday, but couldn’t resist a detour to Stranraer, as you’ll have noticed from the last post. Who would have thought Matt Jess would be so keen to drive 6 miles in the wrong direction just to get his photo taken outside an RP church?!

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We stopped off in Ayr for some supplies:

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And eventually made it to Airdrie. It’s great going back on a GO team and immediately meeting people who have only been converted in the past year. We then laid down a challenge for the locals, which sadly found no takers:

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After tea we played some Switch If with the locals and found out far more than we ever wanted to know about My (not mine specifically) Chemical Romance.

On Thursday morning we did the first of our studies on 1 Peter. Rather interactive it was too! (Not shown in photo)

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Then it was into the mission booklets. We got about 5,000 of the 16,000 given out on the first day, and members of the congregation had already taken a couple of thousand to give out around where they lived. We were helped by members of the CY, and though the church members had only been asked to come out and help on the Saturday, a number of them were helping us anyway.

After tea we went to the park and played some continuous cricket and stuff with the Airdrie young people:

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Friday saw us fly through some more leaflet distribution, with the photo below showing all the boxes that were left at lunchtime:

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After the afternoon session, there was only one solitary box left intact in the hall, and they had to ring up members of the congregation and tell them they wouldn’t be needed on the Saturday after all. My prediction of half an hour for it all wasn’t that far off!

One of the highlights of the team was being schooled by Sir Andrew Q on some vital issues:

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Joel and Walker listen intently

On the Friday night we went to Glasgow to see ‘Amazing G’ in the cinema. We tried to leave the girls behind (they should have seen it coming from that photo up there) but were unsuccessful. The cinema was absolutely massive with about a million floors and even more screens. I couldn’t even fit it all into one photo!

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Then we went back and visited Mr. K-BOB!!! Yooooooooo. What a nice man.

On Saturday morning we finished off the leaflets and then had lunch with a growing number of hangers-on, including Alicia from Cyprus!

Then, GO Team, CY, hangers-on, Beth and the Alexanders went to Edinburgh where Dick Noodle gave us a Covenanter Tour on Jan Knax and other men and women greatly used of God in Scaatland’s past. It seems that the responsibilities of a Presbytery teacher involve giving Covenanter Tours, laughing at Andrew’s jokes, preaching, wearing dickie-bows and leading METs.

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Up to mischief no doubt, safely out of the gaze of Uncle Andrew

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This year’s award for best named shop went to the purveyors of…

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Walker wanted to know whether the Covenanters’ Prison was where the Covenanters put Baptists, or where the Covenanters were imprisoned

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He wasn’t laughing when we put him in it

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We got a quick trip to the National Museum of Scotland but had to bomb round it in 5 minutes as it was about to shut. Having seen Peden’s house, we now got to see his mask, sword and ‘snuff mull’!

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Then out again and past where J. K. Rowling used to write the Harry Potter books:

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And then we hit Pizza Hut, where they surprisingly managed to fit in all 25 of us at 2 tables!

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The waiter said it was the longest bill he’d ever seen!

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Then we sung Happy Birthday to David for about the 15th time that day and the nice Pizza Hut people gave him a wee cake

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On the bus home and during the rest of the evening we compiled an Ultimate XI, Heroes XI (captained by Dennis Irwin), Most Overrated XI…

On the Sabbath morning we had our latest start – breakfast wasn’t till 9:15! Rad! We then went to the Bible class, followed by the prayer meeting. It’s pretty class being in a prayer meeting with just about every possible member of the church at it and the church hall completely bunged. It’s a pity that many over here don’t see the involvement of the congregation in activities other than the Sunday morning service as of utmost importance – and important enough to challenge those who don’t go about how they’re harming both themselves and the body life of the church. Same for the midweek and evening service.

Andrew preached on Haggai 2, with a children’s address on Charles Eleven, and then we had lunch in the hall and went for a cold walk to the park. After we had washed up of course. Me an Jonny slaving away as usual!

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Dick preached in the evening, then we had pizza and popcorn and stuff made for us in the hall (class!) and then we went to the Manse for another session. I also managed to add to my collection of Willy T with flowers:

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On Monday it was back to the early starts as we had a fry, did our last study on 1 Peter, and made lunch to eat on the way to the boat. On the boat we came up with a Biblical Names XI and then a Biblical Books XI.

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Walker laughing is a sight to behold

And that was about it. Best Airdrie team ever, and up there for best GO team ever. Now all that remains is to pray earnestly for the Mission they’re having from Monday 16th – Friday 20th April, and the rest of the work in Airdrie. Here’s some group photos (thanks to Matt and Strob for some of the photos above):

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Joined by 2 delegates from the Chinese RPC

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All the Photos
Related posts: Airdrie GO Team 2006

14 thoughts on “Airdrie GO Team 2007

  1. great time had by all. do tom and joel somerville get a mention for coming all the way from glasgow(on wednesday night)? i really am going to have to reinvent myself.

  2. why not? willy t has a car that can shake once it hits 50mph, he gets about more often than anyone else, i may be wrong.anyways we used the train..its fast. and willy t stays in bebo land, or maybe he is watching at this very moment.

  3. I’d say he’s over-rated. Granted he scores goals, quite a few in fact, but take away penalties and deflections and the tally is less impressive. And how many big games for England and Chelsea has he been anonymous in?? If Frank isn’t scoring, he isn’t contributing – unlike players such as Gerrard and Ronaldo who can score but can also dominate and win games without scoring.

  4. Certainly, there are many deflected goals at any level of football. But I have had this suspicion about Lampard for some time, have watched closely for a couple of seasons now … and the evidence supports my view. It’s clearly his tactic – shoot early, shoot often. Some fly in directly, many take a nick off an opponent and deceive the keeper. You only have to look at his scoring record (or non-scoring record) at last year’s World Cup to see how much he struggles when he doesn’t get his usual quota of fortunate ricochets.

    At the end of the day (or the match!), deflected goals and penalties still count and still win games. But they also skew statistics which can then be used to make players like Lampard seem like world beaters when they clearly are not.

  5. Indeed I agree Daniel. Peter should pass this info on to Steve “not very good” McClaren. If England were to drop Frankie they would be a much better team and might win the odd game. Anyways this is rather off topic so i’ll start a thread on it on the Bulletin Boards.

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