20-YEAR-OLD Lil Campbell is setting out on the adventure of her lifetime. But first it took a brush with death to jolt her into reality.

Wake up call: Lil

Saturday night. Drinks and drugs freely passed around. Lil Campbell, then 16, was at a house party in Northampton.

Lil took a walk to get away from the pounding music. Going into a room, she tripped over something on the floor. She looked down and, to her horror, saw her friend slumped there. She had slipped into an unconscious seizure, obviously overdosing.

Lil says “I prayed – that’s all I could do. It was instinct. Immediately my friend started muttering about horrific things that had happened to her. I prayed harder and started to tell her that Jesus loved her. My friend started crying and fell into a healthy sleep.

“I sat back, suddenly completely sober, and thought, ‘God, You are real!’ It was the turning point of my life.”

Lil had Christian parents, who were, in Lil’s words, “rocks” but Lil wanted to find her own way and answers to life. At 16, she confesses, she had two lives: she had friends in church and stayed with them some weekends; she also went out partying, drinking and dabbling in drugs.

The Sunday morning after her friend overdosed, Lil, thoughtful, alone and brushed off, walked to church and, “had a moment with God. I told Him I didn’t know what to do with my life.”

Lil decided she needed to leave town in order to get her head together and was invited by some of her Christian friends to join them in a mission they were running in Belfast. Some of them lived in a Christian community and shared what they earned and owned. While she was among them, Lil says, “I fell in love with the community way of life, and asked myself, ‘What am I doing with my life?’”

On the way home from Belfast, Lil sat on the top of a double-decker bus and prayed.

“Up to that point I hadn’t had much of a relationship with God” she says. “I sensed God wanted me to live in community. I had grown up in a rough area and saw the beauty of sharing. When you share your money and lives, you can be available to help people. I’m a reckless person and, when I got home, I told my family, ‘I’m moving into community this week.’”

Two and a half years ago, Lil moved into a Jesus Army house in Northampton called Koinonia (a New Testament Greek word meaning “sharing together”).

Now 20, Lil is about to spread her wings and move to another community house, Lighthouse, in Liverpool. Last year, she was part of a Jesus Army outreach team in Liverpool and became very aware of the great need there. She sensed God say “I need you to fill the need. Will you?”

“I felt like God said ‘I’ll stay with you, even If you can’t see where you are going’,” adds Lil.

Her decision to leave Koinonia has been a very difficult one as Lil loves sharing her life with the people there. Her comment was: “I wish God’s call was sent in the post with a risk assessment and flow chart to show you where you have to get to. But it’s not like that. Instead, I have to trust.”

Looking towards an exciting – even if a bit scary – future, Lil says “I’ve been forgiven a lot and learned to love. I do not see it as my duty to build up God’s church; it’s my heart – I want to! I’m inspired!”

This month’s Jesus Army E-Streetpaper is available – sign up to receive a monthly e-mail with stories from the Jesus Army’s Streetpaper here.

This month's E-paper

EACH month, we release a different Jesus Army track on our website. This month’s offering is a remix of a song introduced to us at the first RAW event in 2007, called “The Real Jesus”. Here are the lyrics:

I want to break the stained glass window, see through the stereotypes.
I want to push past all the false Messiahs of shallow “Christian” hype
I want to get beyond my own desires of what You’ll say to me
And listen to Your real words, Jesus,
Whatever those words…..
Whatever they may be

I’m gonna find you, not gon’ be blinded
Yeah I must meet the man with scars
Oh I’m wanna know you
Quittin’ all my hiding to discover who you are

I want to slam the door on my fantasies, stop lying to myself.
I’ve got to stop pretending all is well, in a life of sin by stealth.
Not going to try and make a heaven from hell, with the pleasures of this earth
Abandon all, let me follow You, Jesus,
To Discover your…
Discover Your true worth

Yeah I will carry my cross daily
And I will kiss You if You slay me
Know You as you really are

… And here’s the song!

The real Jesus by Jesus Army

Sweet success

THE SHEFFIELD Jesus Centre were treated to an amazing set of statistics about their first 12 weeks of operating: 188 different people have come to the Centre’s activities (including art groups, a drop-in for the homeless and a café).

They have 25 visitors per day and the number is increasing, as are the services they’re running.

They enjoyed a Gala Day not long after opening, complete with face-painting, book and cake stalls and a visit from the Lord Mayor.

Jesus Centres are now open in London, Coventry, Northampton and Sheffield.

WHAT MAKES mJa member Chris Hunt boil with rage…

I felt sick the other day. Unfortunately, I felt sick when we were meant to be worshipping – and it was the “worship” that made me sick. I found myself feeling “performed at” and it sickened me.

Sick of insincere worship?

I don’t necessarily mean that the worship leading was disingenuous or faked, but it did bring home to me that worship must must must MUST be a thing of the heart. If you’re not careful you can “do” all the right things and sound pretty, but it’s just a performance. God’s not really in it. And actually, you can smell the difference.

We talk (and sing!) about our worship being “a fragrance to God”, but how often are we just mumbling along, with our heart not really in it, wondering what time dinner is – or, worse still, just admiring the performance.If that’s a fragrance, it’s one of those nasty, cheap, imitation scents you can buy at the market. Frankly, it stinks (to high heaven).

What about real spontaneous, from-the-heart worship. Shouldn’t we be crying out with worship to God? With gratitude, awe and and and and..? Yet there we were, with the lights turned down and music playing and the worship leader doing his bit. But when he stopped – we stopped. It was like we’d been switched off. It was like we had nothing further to say. It was like we’d had nothing to say in the first place. I smell empty religion and I don’t like it.

Let’s raise the roof, let’s worship so hard and so deep that the programme is scrapped, that songs (or, even better, guitar solos!) are cut – and that God is worshipped. It’s down to us!

WHAT do American actress Winona Ryder, celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson and footballer Steven Gerrard have in common? As well as being famous people, they have all been caught shoplifting at one time, Antony Worrall Thompson most recently.

Mysterious behaviour

What makes rich and famous people steal items that they can easily afford? It’s a mystery. Did you know that certain medications given to people with Parkinson’s disease carry a health warning “May induce shoplifting”?

How does that work?!

It’s a mystery sometimes, the way we behave. Have you ever found yourself hating something you did or said? Saint Paul, one of the first Christian leaders, certainly did. In one of his letters he cries out: “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate!” (Romans 7:15, The Bible).

Paul identifies in himself an innate selfishness that twists his best intentions. This is what causes us to hurt those we love, act in ways we are ashamed of, and let ourselves down.

Christians know this as “sin”. Rich and famous sinners need the cure just as much as homeless thieves. The cure is a person. His name is Jesus. His living, guiding presence in our lives is the answer to our deepest problem.

Carrying the fire

2012 IS THE year of the Olympic flame in the UK. Amazing spectacle. World records will be smashed. Olympic heroes – men and women – will emerge victorious.

The greatest hero of them all is Jesus Christ, who won the victory over death itself. This year the Jesus Army will carry the flame of the good news about Him all around this country.

That good news is that through Jesus all of us can win. It is especially good news for those who know they are poor and broken, and those who know they need forgiveness and a new start.

And you? Are you ready this year for your new, fired-up life to begin?

WHEN JEFFERSON Bethke, 22, posted his “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” video on YouTube, he made a bet with his roommates about how many views the video would get by morning.

The highest bet was 6,000. By the time Bethke woke up the next day, the video had more than 100,000 views. Eight days later, it had been watched more than 14 million times. The number continues to skyrocket.

The video, Bethke said, was not an attempt to bash all religion, but “against legalism, self-righteousness, self-justification and hypocrisy”. It contains catchy lines like: “The problem with religion is it never gets to the core / It’s just behaviour modification, like a long list of chores” and “I’m just saying quit putting on a fake look / Cause there’s a problem if people only know you’re a Christian by your Facebook”.

Christian video becomes 'viral hit'

The video has been discussed by both religious scholars and armchair theologians. Some point out that pitching Jesus against all religion is too sweeping: Jesus was a religious Jew. Bethke himself says “You have to get back to my definition of religion. Jesus was coming to abolish self- righteousness, justification and hypocrisy.”

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Lost Generation?

IT WAS A dramatic moment at a recent Jesus Army event. The dancers’ t-shirts had big question marks on them. A poem scrolled behind them on a huge screen, and voices were heard, saying “We are a lost generation. And we refuse to believe that we can change the world.”

Hands over ears, the hopelessness and empty words rolled on.

Then suddenly, a moment of change: “Wrong. It’s time we turned our lives around.” The dancers tore off the question marks, revealing bright crosses. The lines of the poem began, quite literally, to scroll in reverse, ending with “We can change the world. And we refuse to believe that we are a lost generation.”

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A NEW FILM came out this year called Shame, by director Steve McQueen. It focuses on sex addiction and why people seek multiple sexual partners without being able to settle down in a faithful relationship.

Director Steve Mcqueen, talking about his film "Shame"

One man, featured in a documentary recently, had slept with over 300 women. He was seeking treatment for his out-of-control behaviour.

Sex addiction features in the pages of the New Testament in the Bible. It’s nothing new. In one famous encounter recorded in the Gospel of John, Jesus meets a woman who has had multiple partners and, through supernatural insight, shocks her with his deep knowledge of her hidden private life.

What then? Does Jesus tell her off? Is he angry at her for her immorality? Does he advise her to seek professional help in an addiction clinic?

No. With a mixture of deep compassion and gentle humour, Jesus reveals to this needy woman that he offers “living water” that meets her deepest need. He shows that this addicted woman is really looking for Him; the Son of God who quenches the desperate thirst of our love-starved hearts.

That “living water” is available today for self-hating, shame ridden addicts of every description. If we know his love, we’ll never need to seek love in the wrong arms again.