We need to stop dreaming about the future and start living the future reality we hope to see. Past youth work blogs have been full of talk of revolutions, manifestos, the need to leave the church, participation and challenges, and it would be easy to say nothing changes. However, on the edge, there has always been a bunch of people trying to live the future now. Sometimes they are called creatives, heretics, or radicals, and even more recently, they have been called pioneers. The reality is that the best of them are simply putting one foot in front the other, following God.
Within StreetSpace, I am constantly struck by how others often think that what people do in our community is edgy, when to most people involved it is so so obvious. It is only others who see giving up a well-paid youth work post to move onto an estate as something radical. To the individual it is simply taking their discipleship and the teaching of Christ seriously and putting one foot in front of the other. This is why I am hopeful for the future - not only of StreetSpace, but also the wider church.
The moves I have made in StreetSpace have been intentional, thought-through and strategic, but they have also been about putting one foot in front the other, feeling our way forward and stepping out into the future. I am very aware that the centre rarely listens to the edge, but I’m also aware that circumstances are changing, so there is more openness to new ideas and ways of being a church. So as I prepare to leave StreetSpace, putting one foot in front of the other to follow a call North, I am reminded of what I once said, that ‘great leaders get out the way’. Now I don’t want to make any claims to greatness, but I do want to offer two things those involved in StreetSpace learnt as we continue the pilgrimage into the future.
Firstly, the pilgrimage into the future is calling the walls to dust; we believe Jesus collapsed the walls between heaven and earth, between us and young people. He broke down the barriers wherever he went. Jesus calls us beyond the old notions of centre and edge. There is no longer in or out, us and them, Christian and non-Christian, kingdom and church or sacred and secular. Instead we journey together with young people as a community, and in doing so; we call the walls to dust.
Our leadership needs to reflect this idea. Leaders need to get out the way. Yes, there is a need for the wisdom and skill that comes with experience, but we need to remember that Jesus ushered in the upside-down kingdom. We need to create a culture of downward mobility, rather than an upward management structure that sees leadership as promotion. As a community of practice, I believe I needed to resist traditional leadership roles in order to enable others to flourish, so for the first three years, I refused to speak at our yearly gatherings.
Additionally, I recognised that others (usually younger) think differently, and in the midst of the huge cultural shift going on, it was important that I prepared others to carry on. This was less about training skills (as too often these are translated from an old paradigm) and more about encouraging risk and an attitude that keeps putting one foot in front of the other. All of this was in order to kick down the walls to let the light in when needed, and to have the wisdom to know when to walk around them.
So here is a call to join the pilgrimage to the future, to build something new and different that pushes theology and practice and pulls the church towards the new. A call to embrace getting out the way, even of something you feel was the best thing you have ever done. A call to make sure that those you are mentoring are being called to mission and not to maintenance, in order to let young adults in their 20s take what you have done further, faster and deeper. A call to make sure that they themselves are mentoring the younger generation. Then perhaps, just maybe the future we want to see will start to be the reality we want to live.
Richard Passmore has worked with Frontier Youth Trust for the past 15 years recently heading up the StreetSpace community of practice. In November he will take a new role as Fresh Expressions Enabler with the God for All team in Cumbria.
