“I found myself at the front on the last night of RAW. My friend prayed for me and I started crying – really crying and crying and crying. And he hugged me and I started crying again and he was crying too.”

For 20-year-old Gideon Clark it was his breakthrough moment. RAW (Real and Wild) is a three-day Christian youth event first run by the Jesus Fellowship in Northampton in August. Gideon was just one of hundreds of young people who experienced God’s power there. Some had barely known anything about “God” or “church” before. Others had grown up in Christian families, but needed their own encounter with the reality of Jesus.

Gideon – and his 18-year-old brother Jake – are definitely in the latter category. Their parents met in the early days of pioneering the Jesus Fellowship. In the ‘70s they had both been part of the then recently-started New Creation Farm in Northamptonshire.

In the ‘80s, when the Jesus Fellowship spread to other areas, they moved to East Anglia to start a church there. They also started a family. The church grew – as did the family: Gideon and Jake are now the second and third of six children.

Their childhood may be regarded by some as somewhat extraordinary: living in a large shared Christian community house with many different kinds of people. But as Gideon and Jake reminisce, their memories are not dissimilar to many other brothers.

Gideon is the more reflective and careful of the two. He weighs his words as he speaks and describes himself as “a planner”. (His plan is to move to a Jesus Fellowship community in the Midlands after having completed his degree at the local university.) Jake is all eagerness and talks nineteen to the dozen about his enthusiasms most of which revolve around some of his friends who are finding God.

Nevertheless, Gideon is clearly moved when he speaks about his experience at RAW:

“It was deep and – unlike me. Tears and snotty nose just aren’t me! I wasn’t expecting to cry. I’d seen people have ‘shakyshaky, laughy-laughy, bouncy-bouncy’ experiences. That isn’t very ‘me’ either, but I guess I was open to something like that. But this was different. It was uncontrollable.

“I thought about it a lot later. If God’s Spirit is inside you – His amazingly clean Spirit – if He touches you even the slightest bit, because human nature is so impure, you can’t help it – the slightest touch of God is just overpowering.”

Unlike Gideon who had always been “quietly interested” in faith (“quietly” until RAW that is), Jake has, characteristically, had a somewhat more colourful, zigzagging journey into belief. He describes – rather cautiously for Jake – a stage of “rebellion” he went through in his early teens before Gideon blurts out – rather incautiously for Gideon – “You were drinking at 12!”

Around the age of 15, however, Jake was very affected when he saw, at close range, someone being powerfully freed by prayer from the oppression of an evil spirit.

“It was the first time I’d really taken it in and saw it. Over the years I’d heard screaming and stuff in meetings sometimes, but I saw it and – wow. Something started to click and I started to feel like maybe I’ve got to start doing something about my own faith.”

“Doing something” didn’t take long for Jake. Days later, in a Religious Studies lesson at school, he found himself telling his school friend, Perry, about what he’d seen. He also started to enjoy worshipping, learning the guitar in a matter of weeks so that he could sing Jesus songs.

Most exciting of all for Jake, his friend Perry started coming to church with him and finding faith for himself. He shared Jake’s passion for music.

“He really likes the ‘One way Jesus’ song, absolutely loves it,” bubbles Jake, adding “The first time I ever prayed for someone was when I prayed for Perry. It was really weird for me. I was laughing as I was praying; I kept my hand on his head and someone was with me saying ‘Yeah, that’s alright’”. Jake was learning how to be a Christian, an evangelist and a leader – all at once.

Then at another large Jesus event, Jake, Perry and some other friends had a powerful experience of God when they were prayed for:

“We went down like a ton of bricks. It was really powerful; there were about four of us there and we were shaking and there were volts going through our hands” (presumably what Gideon described as a ‘shakyshaky, laughy-laughy, bouncy-bouncy’ experience).

Now Gideon and Jake, together with Perry and others, are gathering quite a group of young people around them in Norwich. They call it “JA Youth”, modelled on a similar group in the JA “heartlands” of Northamptonshire.

“It started off with about five or six of us a few years ago” says Gideon. “But now – Jacob’s a wild inspired boy, so it’s starting to fizz a bit more” he adds (with true modesty).

“We have about 13 or 14 now” says Jake. “We’re going to do an event every month – we wanna get people from Yarmouth and Ipswich to come down. It’s gonna be a lot more.” Jake’s infectious enthusiasm bubbles over as he talks about his many dreams: a Jesus multi-media “play”, many young people getting on board, the vision of Christian community spreading (“Community houses – bang bang bang bang”).

Gideon’s dreams are expressed more quietly but run just as deep: “I don’t want to complicate things. It’s just all about the church isn’t it?”

He smiles. “It’s basically whatever God wants...”

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