Notes

I include lots of trivia, such as people, places and shirt colours so that past participants may be able to place themselves in the story. Some of the details may be wrong.

A dilemma many historians face is whether to order content chronologically or by topic? As BWO is a seasonal event, its story fits fairly well into seasons I have gone for one season at a time. I’ve also made a site map that shows the two dimensions.

Each BWO season sees a lot of work in the months before the week itself, so the stories marked with a given year often begin well back in the previous year.

Most of the content here was written by me (Eric Love) but I’d love to include stories from anyone else, even if it’s short or you don’t think you’re a good writer.

What BWO looks like

Big Week Out is an annual Christian youth event. Young people, usually in year 8 to 12, along with mostly young adult leaders. Typically about four days, running each day from morning to evening. The focus is putting Christian faith into practice by serving the community and a large part of the time is spent at a variety of community service events. There’s also worship, teaching & discussion, meals, and fun & games.

You could think of it as a typical Christian youth camp, minus staying the night, plus the service events, with the other stuff squeezed into the rest of the time.

Events

Part of a normal day of BWO involves everyone doing a community service event, which lasts a few hours. Many events are done by one carload of people including 1-2 leaders, some are done by a larger group and sometimes everyone on the base does a large event.

There have been so many different events done over the years. I’ll list these with the most common first.

Backyard blitz: Rarely as fancy as the TV show of that name, we simply do gardening for people who are elderly or otherwise unable to do it themselves.

Nursing homes: We visit an aged care home, join in the activities staff are running and talk with residents.

Cleanup / KESAB: We clear up rubbish in a park or beach area.

Clowning: We dress up as clowns and learn to make balloon animals, then go to a shopping centre and give balloon animals to kids. A favourite event for some people.

Community service orgs: We’ve helped many organisations in a range of ways, sometimes joining in or seeing the hands-on work including with homeless people in the city, sometimes just catching up with a backlog of mainenance or admin.

Schools etc: Go to a school and do whatever they need – painting, gardening, sorting out supplies. Or the same thing at churches or any other place/organsation.

Car wash: We set up in a church carpark and passing motorists pop in for a free car wash. In 2007 we borrowed most of the council-owned car wash mats in Adelaide. A simpler alternative was windscreen washing.

Community event: We run a fun event, with games and perhaps clowns as above, at Elder Park or Tusmore Park. Or join the crowd at a skate park or the Tour Down Under and give out water or sunscreen.

Cooking: Stay at the base and help make dinner for everyone on base or cook biscuits for prisoners.

Awareness: Stay at the base and learn about people in hardship locally or overseas and about the organisations that help them.

Blood donation: This has happened a few times with people aged 16+ who chose this event.

After each event we talk about how we found it. There is often a chance to share experiences with the rest of the base.

Although events take a minority of the time of BWO, they account for a majority of the preparation. Someone needs to contact the relevant organisation and arrange what we’re doing, often a few months earlier. There’s often a lot of emailing or calling back & forth, or visiting to determine the suitablility and size of the tasks or if we need to bring any equipment. Risks are assessed and an event sheet is written up describing things for the leaders who will be going on the day. Sometimes the same event will run over multiple days, but usually with different participants.

Allocating people to events has been a challenge, particularly in some of the early BWOs there were 100+ people going to 15+ events. We needed about the right number at each event, the right number of car seats going to those events (the cars of that event’s leaders holding a full licence, plus any extra driver borrowed for pick-up & drop-off). Beyond those constraints we wanted participants not to go to the same sort of event twice. This scheduling effort took a lot of time before we wrote software to help us do it. Even with that done, there was often a lot of admin work during the week printing out event sheets, lists of who was going where, and making sure the right people got out the door on their way to the right places.

Since 2006 BWO has been held in one of the last two weeks of the summer holidays. January in Adelaide can be very hot. Outdoor events, especially those involving physical work, need to be planned with this in mind. Sometimes events are cancelled and we stack the indoor ones with more people or scramble to arrange others. Sometimes events are called off partway through when the temperature gets too high. Once a whole timeslot was axed and we went swimming instead. Once every day was over 40 and outdoor events for the whole week got knocked out.

Adelaide (except for the hills) is quite dry, particularly in summer, but sometimes rain has caused outdoor events to be cancelled or end early, both in the pre-2006 winter BWOs or sometimes in summer.

some backstory

Since 1999 a Christian volunteer team (now known as the Green Team) has been serving at schoolies celebrations each November in and around Victor Harbor. They give out food & drink, arrange entertainment, look after the intoxicated and generally make it a safer and more fun place to be. Thousands of young South Australians return home having had positive dealings with Christians. Green Team is bigger than BWO and deserves to have its history written too, if that hasn’t been done. There are also similar teams at schoolies elsewhere around Australia.

Schoolies offers a unique opportunity to love people on a large scale. Jason Hoet (Unley Park Baptist) and PJ Taylor (Rosefield Uniting) were on the team at schoolies in 2000 and got thinking about what could be brought closer to home – how could their youth groups serve the community?

A popular youth activity in the Adelaide Christian community around that time was Big Night Out, held from time to time in the holidays. They booked several fun venues – bowling alleys, video game arcades, a pool hall etc. Young people could play at these places all night, travelling between them on buses and their parents would pick them up exhausted in the morning.

Jason & PJ considered that church youth groups had many options like Big Night Out for having fun, but few organised avenues for serving. They ran Big Week Out as a way of giving their youth a go at this.

summer 2002

Venue: Oxford Theatre, Unley
Churches involved: UPBC, Rosefield, St John’s Lutheran Unley
About 60 people

There was a great car wash on Unley Road?

photos from Jason Hoet

winter 2002

Venue: Rosefield?
140 people
More churches including St John of the Cross joining in.

By now it was a bigger operation being run by a growing taskforce.

photos from Jason Hoet

summer 2003

Venue: Fullarton Scout Hall
T-shirts: navy blue with lime green. The T-shirt design would vary for the next several years while maintaining the colours.

Participating churches included Australasian Christian Church, who would be an important part of BWO ever since then.

winter 2003

at Rosefield Uniting? or UHS?
Shirts: Navy with lime green sleeves

Scheduling had become such a big task that the taskforce were doing it well into the night. Bryn wrote a program called “Captain Scheduler”, which assigned people to events, taking into account details such as the numbers needed for each event, number of car seats available and what category of events each person was doing already.

This season was a good one for participants coming to new faith.

summer 2004

18-25 January (Sun night to Fri)
210 people, at Unley High School
Speaker: Mark Ryan

This was the most people on a single base. There were two event timeslots on Mon & Wed, which meant a quick morning session, a short morning event, returning for lunch and going off to the afternoon event.

One of the big events was at Elder Park. On the Mon & Wed we wanted people there for the morning & afternoon timeslot without a break. So the afternoon group left the base as soon as they were all back from their morning events, when they arrived, the morning group were taken back to the base in time to leave on their afternoon events.

Friday had two event timeslots scheduled but we cancelled one due to heat and went to the swimming pool.

winter 2004 Burnside

AACC, who had been part of the last few seasons, while Burnside Christian Church and Knightsbridge Baptist were recruited. There were about 25 people, mostly from AACC, and rather than run a fully separate base, they were part of the morning and evening sessions at Unley, driving across to the Burnside area for events and using Knightsbridge at mealtimes.

winter 2005

After BWO in July 2004, some of the taskforce went to London to take part in Soul in the City.

Now that BWO was running in two regions, instead of one big taskforce organising everything, there would be a Regional Taskforce (RTF) in each region and a Citywide Coordinating Team (CCT) who did more of the long-term planning and anything that was best done for both regions at once. The CCT had many of those who were on the one taskforce in earlier years.

After seven BWOs, coming every six months and with the scale increasing, it was time to slow down and the event was not held in summer 2005.

Both regions opted for only one event timeslot per day (both weeks in 2004 had seen a day or more with two). This pattern remained for the most part for most regions.

2006

With an increasing amount of knowledge about running this complicated event and the need to convey this to regions running BWO for the first time, the CCT around this time wrote a manual detailing everything they knew about

As BWO had spread wider and was requiring more work to organise, it was agreed that once a year was enough. What time of the year was best? Weather and other events on the Christian youth calendar were the main considerations.
Summer can be very hot in Adelaide, sometimes enough that outdoor events must be cancelled. Summer holidays are about six weeks (the others are usually two), so five days are not a large chunk of it. Christmas and CE camps fall in the first half of the holidays, and the last week of holidays had worked well, although it didn’t suit teachers and chaplains who needed to be back at school.
Autumn has the best weather. Easter (and therefore Easter camps) falls before or during the holidays.
We’d done BWO the last five winters, but not as many days long as the summer ones. Sometimes events would get rained out.
Spring has good weather. SAYCO is an annual fixture and other churches may also have had things on the long weekend.
We went for the last week of the summer holidays.

Most of the work of RTFs has happened from November to January, a season that includes exams, schoolies, Christmas, CE camps, beach missions and peak season for weddings & travel.

BWO 2006 was on 22-27 January

Speaker: Shirley Osborn from St Martin’s Community Church in Melbourne

Sat night combined celebration service at AACC City

With about 240 people in total, the division into two bases had finally been worth it and prepared the way for what followed.

We borrowed seven car wash mats from five councils.

2006 East

Athelstone Uniting and Rivergate Christian Community joined in.

We had a good number of leaders (with cars), so each day at least one of us would go to the Unley base, where they were short of them.

The largest event was a Backyard Blitz at Flagstaff Hill (the Vuong family), with people going there in every timeslot.

Thursday (Australia Day) was very hat so the whole day was rearranged – the morning session shifted to the afternoon, the events moved into the evening to avoid the heat, but many spent the morning continuing the blitz at the Vuongs’ while three went to Unley as extra driver-leaders, as they’d moved their afternoon events to the morning.

Again on the Monday (or Saturday?) after, many of us returned to finish the blitz. Enoch Vuong went on to be an RTF member for a number of years after that.

Venue: Burnside Christian.
80 people, the high water mark for East

2007

After BWO 06 the CCT’s next meeting was at Andrea’s house in a room that looked out westwards across Adelaide. Andrea read from Deuteronomy…

Matt Boundy was Project Officer

CCT’s work included online registration. The same system was used for Green Team.

A video was made (collaboration of HisOwn, Bible Society and Scripture Union) rather than all the bases having speakers.

375 people across 5 regions – the high water mark for overall numbers

We got a writeup in the Advertiser (Mon 22nd?)

22-28 January

Sat night combined celebration service at Concordia

2007 West

The West region was spearheaded by Neil Milton (Adelaide West Uniting), and also involved Grange Baptist, Port Adelaide Uniting and Gateway Baptist, 60 people in total. Without leaders who had been at previous BWOs, they did many things differently. They only ran on the Wednesday and Thursday but did three short events each day. One of these was a whole base event at Fulham Gardens PS.

2007 Inner South

Held at Rosefield

Jacob Mangelsdorf, 113 ppl

Participating churches included Chinese CMA

They were short of drivers, so some doing events in the city travelled bus bus (including some clowns?)

2007 East

72 people
held at CityEdge Church

One memorable moment was at the closing celebration. Evan Morrish did the thankyous and called out the name of everyone on the base, most of whom he had only met that week, as he threw a token to each one.

2007 Melbourne

Baptist churches in Victoria ran a youth service project called Urban Summer. Dan Harbottle, who’d been in Adelaide and was youth pastor at Lilydale Baptist, worked together with other churches (not just baptist) in outer eastern Melbourne and ran their week along the lines of BWO using our resources.

2008

during 07, CCT made the knowledge base
Matt Boundy moved to Melbourne. No Project Officer after that.

Theme: Luke 10

21-26 January, 380(?) total

closing service at Concordia

2009

CCT – the project manager handbook, team care handbook, etc

Theme: the kingdom of God is like…

19-24 January, 280 total
Last time with dark blue shirts

Closing service at AACC

It was very hot the week after

2009 West

at Gateway Baptist

just Thu-Fri, 40 ppl

Whole base event at Le Fevre Peninsula PS, which previously had been unwilling to have Christian input in the school, but thereafter allowed it.

2010 West

Portside Church, Mon-Wed, 30 ppl
with Portside Christian Church

Each day we had a big event at a school: West Lakes Shore PS, Ocean View College and Lefevre HS. At Lefevre, we painted a very long fence. That was an important step towards Portside (later PortLife) working in the school and some years later lots of Lefevre kids were part of the PortLife youth group.

spring 2010 West

The BWO that fell through.

With a number of the likely leaders in the region unavailable in summer, we aimed to run BWO in the spring holidays at Ferryden Park Lutheran. When some people said they couldn’t make it in spring, it was going to be a fairly small thing, with just Grange and Cheltenham involved.

Then the week before, when many of the Grange people were away on holiday (“It would be easier to run BWO in Queensland than here”) and others were sick, we decided to call it off. Much of the organisation was being left until the last minute, so there wasn’t much to cancel. It was never too big to fail. We rang to cancel the few events we had arranged.

Ferryden Park had already made food for us an hired a skip for work we would to there, so on the Tuesday the Cheltenham youth group came and did that event. While we were there, we invited some kids off the street to join in the work (and the food).

On the Thursday the Cheltenham youth took those kids on a hike. Some were involved with Ferryden Park Lutheran in the years to come, and the failed BWO was the first time they had come into the building.

That was the end of BWO in the west, although Grange people joined the SW region, which later became West again.

2016

18-22 Jan

By this time BWO was running under that banner of Scripture Union.

Monday was combined – leader training through the day and evening kick-off with all the participants – at St Johns Lutheran – album

2016 City

AACC Tusmore – Alisha Thiel – speaker Seth Emery

Nearly 100 people including over 40 leaders

On Friday we all went to O’Halloran Hill Conservation Park, where we pulled of triangular tree guards from not-so-newly planted trees and chopped off artichocke heads. A big storm was coming, so we kept an eye on the radar and were ready to leave when the rain arrived.

Facebook albums: Tue Wed Thu Fri

Eric’s story – Brian and the broom.

At Westcare they cook lunch for anyone who comes, homeless or city workers. Six of us went there to help serve lunch and do some cleaning. I wasn’t feeling that well, I was a bit tired and sunburnt from the day before, so I didn’t really want to be there, but it turned into the most memorable of the many BWO events I’d done. The water wasn’t working for a while. One man came to wash all his clothes and sat covered by a blanket while he waited. Later I heard him in the chapel playing the piano. I got talking a man who’d come on his bike and found he was into programming like me.

The six of us were sitting at a table in the courtyard when Brian appeared, greeting us with “Shalom!”. He’s a mystical sort of man whom I’ve seen at various Christian events. He came and started talking to our group. At the same time, another man had come to the building across the courtyard looking for his phone, which he had left on a charger there. He couldn’t find it and became very upset, shouting and kicking a pot plant. Brian was leaning back against a pole, facing us, saying things like “Don’t listen to the noise coming from the world. Look to Christ… “, just when the upset man threw a broom in our direction. It struck the pole Brian was leaning against and broke in two, with one piece somehow ending up in his hand. He proceeded to lean on it and with his long hair and beard he looked to us like an Old Testament character leaning on his staff. “God’s timing is perfect”, he said at some point in this sequence.

I’ve gone there for lunch a few times in the years since.

2018 East

at Burnside City UC

Michelle Foong was project manager
Jason Hoet was speaker

Facebook albums: Tue Wed Thu Fri

Friday’s whole base event was going to be a big cleanup at Moana. During the week Friday’s forecast climbed from 33 to 41 so our event was cancelled on the Thursday, as the staff who would have accompanied us were going to be on fire watch. We needed replacement events for everyone and arranged to continue five of our events into Friday and surprisingly, a ringaround arranged seven new events.

We had around 100 people including those who would have been on North base had it gone ahead. Only three of our events were actually in the eastern suburbs.

2018 North

For many years people from north of Grand Junction Rd had been part of BWO, including some key leaders. There were often conversations about having a base there. In the 2018 season we planned to run, with participating churches including Kings Baptist and Salisbury Baptist. It fell through and some of those who registered went instead to the East base.