Case Study: Adventure Plus

JON’S STORY

Setting up Adventure Plus was never the ‘plan’. I came back to the UK after a trip to the Sudan, having seen some amazing answers to prayer, and expecting to go back into development work. I met, within two weeks of being back in the UK, a guy my age who had been working for five years since leaving school. He sat there across from me in a coffee shop, and said: ‘There has to be more to life than this.’ Seeing a perfectly intelligent bloke, aged 23, and already bored with life, really struck me. It drove me to pray, and out of that came the challenge: what are you going to do about it? Adventure Plus was born. The heart of Adventure Plus is encouraging young people to embrace the adventure of faith. Our faith is an adventure, and it certainly isn’t an invitation to take the easy option, but an invitation to step out into adventures of mission.

Fast forward to 2015, 25 years on, and we now work with 6,000 children, young people and young adults each year offering something we call ‘adventure youth work’ – climbing, canoeing, mountain biking, fencing and more. We work with a wide range of client groups, including schools, youth groups and churched young people. We provide adventure holidays, and instructortraining gap years, where people with no qualifications come along and are trained to be fully qualified instructors and adventure youth workers. Every single one of the children and young people who come along on our activities are invited to an adventure holiday in the summer, in order to develop a long-term relationship with us. A weekend away might not change lives, but it could be the start of relationships which could.

We work with a wide range of children, young people and young adults, and our mission statement is this: to provide the best possible course in line with each client’s needs, and to be a credible Christian witness in all we do. So if it’s a group of young people who don’t think they have any interest in Christianity, and we sit down and say look, here’s they gospel – firstly, they aren’t going to listen, and secondly, we are not actually delivering what we’ve been asked to do, as a professional youth work service. But if it’s a church youth group and we are asked, as we were a year or two ago, to explore the book of Hosea around the camp fire – then we are very happy to do that! We try to meet people where they are at.

It’s an exciting time for us, because up until this year, didn’t have our own centre. We operated the whole thing out of the back of three minivans. About three years ago, one of our directors pulled me aside and said, ‘Seriously Jon, you can’t hope to continue the complexity and quality of what you are doing without a centre.’ The other important thing about having a centre is that historically we’ve been quite ephemeral; we rock up, set up and then pack up and go again. Whereas if we have a centre we welcome people into the warmth and hospitality that we want to create. So we’ve got this amazing opportunity to develop a brand new adventure base in Oxfordshire, about 90 minutes from central London, Birmingham and Coventry. It’s already got a small Christian conference centre on the site, along with 50 acres of Oxford countryside to build the adventure base. It’s a 2 million pound project, which we are currently fundraising for, and we’re looking at some really creative ideas. We will have all the traditional outdoor pursuits, but we also want to include some fastly developing free sports in a new urban adventure zone, like skating, scooting and parkour. There’s also a fantastic sport which is currently only available on the coasts, called coasteering; it involves climbing along sea cliffs as opposed to up them, and if you fall off you just fall into deep water. Our plan is to create the first artificial inland coasteering facility in the UK, to go into a three-acre lake on site. We are also going to create an opensided climbing wall, both indoor and outdoor, and an indoor firehood and pit so the rain can’t get in the way of the all-important campfire!

The exciting thing for me is that there is no doubt that this will be a site where thousands of children and young people come, and gain unique and special memories, all within a positive Christian environment, and where many will come to know their value. We have been going for 25 years and we know of many young people and who have come through and gone on in their own adventure of faith – this place will fast forward that.

Jon Cox is the founder and director of Adventure Plus.