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Here to Eternity A Few Words with Long-Term Volunteer Rob Lampard

Rob Lampard has been volunteering with SU WA for many years – our Director Kent Morgan remembers Rob as his Sailing Camp leader in the nineties (see pic below, right!), and Rob and family are still serving strong. Rob recalls his first experience getting involved, and a moving memory from a recent Beach Mission.

After following other young Christian adults into leading with SU, Rob started considering this ministry more intentionally. “Serving on Beach Mission was more of an adult decision to really make a contribution to Kingdom work. I looked at my life and the way I spent my time and decided I needed to find opportunities to be involved in something that furthers God’s Kingdom.”

“Like anyone (I went) along for the first time to Beach Mission to see what it’s like – our kids were very little then. But from that, we just saw ‘OK this is clearly a way to be in contact with people who don’t know Jesus’. Somehow in some little or large way you can get them to think about who Jesus is.”

Rob relayed one particular instance of a young person moving unexpectedly closer to Jesus at Beach Mission.

“A few years back at Denmark, on one of the evenings after our activity that night, I was just sitting in our area outside the marquee. I had my bible with me, I wasn’t intending on sitting there for any quiet time, I just found myself there, flipping through pages fairly aimlessly. There was a crew of teenage boys in the park who had been known as the trouble-makers. They’d been kind of skirting round the edges of the teen program. I wasn’t really sure what they were looking for – but one of them spotted me out on the lawn and came over and asked me, ‘What are you reading?’ And so this very brief conversation ensued with me telling him it was the bible, he must have cottoned on… He asked me ‘How much of it have you read, front to back?’ and asked me about what the bible is.”

“There was no aggression, there was no hostility. Then right at that point one of our team leaders came out of the tent, and wandered over and was able to strike up a conversation and a few of the boys from his crew joined in that night in the gospel tent.”

“Did we see them get saved that night? No, but it was a remarkable moment. If you’d seen those boys in the beginning of the week, you wouldn’t believe they’d be in the tent by the end of the week. Something had happened. The prayer was that whatever they heard that night from the bible, there was a seed planted. That was one of those very unexpected moments.”

Over a few decades of leading Rob has noticed cultural changes, which missions have responded to and moved alongside, as have Rob and his family as they’ve joined in serving. “Beach missions are interesting things these days, they’re very different to what they used to be, cultural rules are a lot different, there are lots of things you could do then that you just can’t do now. But of course, God still is working regardless of all that.”