Motiv8 | Naomi

At least every week, I get asked this question, 'When are we going to camp?' The children and young people in our community are so enthusiastic for these opportunities to get away on a Motiv8 weekend. Often it’s the incentive they need to get involved in a group and to stay connected.

I lead an SU Group at Clovenstone Primary, a priority school in Edinburgh, and pretty much every Tuesday lunchtime, someone will be asking me that question! The young people get pretty excited in the run up to a weekend away. We managed two weekends in the course of 2025, one at Lendrick Muir and one at Gowanbank, and we are planning the same again in the year ahead.

Weekends away are great for all sorts of reasons. They give us the opportunity to get to know the young people much better, helping us to connect with different aspects of their lives such as health or family issues that might not be obvious from the short weekly meeting at school. They are also great for community building, providing a reason to get to know the families of young people and to invite them to other events at church. And of course they are places where we explore the Bible together, finding out about God’s love for them.

Motiv8 Holidays are subsidised by the SU Scotland Holidays Sponsorship Fund in order to make them much more affordable than SU Holidays in general. Holy Trinity Wester Hailes and Wester Hailes Baptist Church have both provided funds to enable local young people to attend. We also say to families that we don’t ever want funding to be a barrier, so we make different arrangements, depending on family circumstances.

Some of the young people have now moved on to Wester Hailes Academy. When we see them at the lunchtime drop-in there, they are still asking that question, 'When can we go to camp?'. So we are now looking at the possibility of a weekend away for the secondary age group also.

I am also asked the question at church sometimes: 'When are we going to camp?' There are young people who come on a Sunday whose families don’t come. We offered them the fun of an activity day at Lendrick Muir. This felt like the ideal first step on the journey. We will keep looking for opportunities to go away together.

One of the things that I love about being away together is the teaching time. I always imagined that it would be a struggle to get the young people to settle, but the opposite generally seems to be the case. It can be chaos for the hour before, but when we get together to explore the Bible, a peace descends, and the young people settle and listen. I am always amazed that God does that each time.

Naomi Black

Naomi Black is the children’s worker at Holy Trinity Wester Hailes, and volunteers at Motiv8 events.