Yesterday, for my day off and given it is the summer holidays, we took a trip over to Llandudno. As you do, we had a nice time on the pier and ate fish and chips. The kids also enjoyed spending the afternoon with the beach team.

I haven’t done a beach mission for some years, but I am grateful for them. A few folk I knew were on the team this week and it was great to talk with one of them about how various things I learnt to do on beach missions – that I was doing over 20 years ago when I first started doing them – I still use now in my church context.

I was set to thinking about how I would love for people in my church to go on a team. Less for the sake of the mission itself (we have lots of mission to do where we are and people are well involved) but to just learn and train in how to speak to ordinary people. I think there are few better training grounds for evangelism, mission and ministry than a beach mission.

They are not glamorous (like the reality of most missions and ministries). They reach ordinary people in fairly ordinary places (like the reality of most missions in most churches). They teach people how to engage ordinary people in ordinary outreach (like you need to do in most churches). I think the short term combination of reaching real people, in ordinary places, finding ways to speak to them in ordinary ways and learning how to address their ordinary questions is just brilliant training for local church ministry.

On a personal level, I can think of specific things I do in my community now that I learnt from people on beach missions. I learnt to preach – first and foremost – by doing open airs on a beach mission, and then in my home town and only then translated doing that into a pulpit. Whatever else you might think of open air preaching, you have to learn to be clear, concise and pithy with a moving crowd who will tell you exactly what they think of you. What better training could there be for preaching in a church in a deprived community where you will get much the same? I suspect more than a few middle class preachers in middle class churches would be very much helped by the same training ground!

So, I was pleased for see the beach mission there. I was glad for them and reminded of the value of training with real people, in real places to the benefit of the church. Maybe think about whether such training might be useful for you or people in your church and consider going yourself.