To start with, a recommendation: as I travelled to Felden straight from my university, and it was easy to get from London Euston to Hemel Hempstead Station, I thought it would be fairly easy to walk from the station to Felden Lodge. This proved to not be the case, as even though the walk is quite short, it is nearly all uphill so I wouldn’t strongly recommend it! As people gradually arrived and made conversation, the first item on the agenda was dinner, which many people were looking forward to!
Each group comes up with their own agenda for the weekend, and seven of the guys that run some of the BB websites worked through what we’d set ourselves to do for the weekend, which included continued maintenance and development of the websites, although obviously I can’t give too much away about some things! The International Team used their meetings to develop ideas for an upcoming project involving the Boys’ Brigade in Cameroon, and KJC did a lot of coming up with and learning new material as well as going over old stuff. Part of the weekend was also devoted to writing material for the new Company Section programme pack, which should be out and about soon.
Worship sessions play a part in the weekend, and all three teams get the chance to lead worship at different times – the WST always seem to get Saturday morning, so it always means a late night on Friday coming up with something! It is also a requirement on these sorts of weekends to not go to bed too early, something which can be proven by the fact that I ended up going to bed at half past three on both of the nights!
Not all weekend is spent locked away in rooms working on projects, as there is a lot of social time between the groups. Felden has a lot of sporting facilities, so we could have a game of football, play pool, table tennis, or people who didn’t find that to their liking could just sit around talking or playing other games.
While this is just a bit of an overview of what happens at New Horizons, a lot of people come from all over the country to this event, so it is a fantastic opportunity to make new friends and get involved with the BB on a wider scale. A lot of the people will be getting back together at Firm Foundations in May to do various things, so keep an eye out for a report on that when the time comes!
Written by Tom Boorman