Paired work becomes troublesome. Group work seems fairly redundant. Games are a bit lame. And more than all of this, I can detect the ‘if the others didn’t show up, why should I bother listening’ mindset, written all over the faces of my young people.
I’d love to say that it was a resounding success, and as a super talented youth worker I adapted the session with spectacular ease and efficiency off the cuff. We made it through, but it was far from ideal – and I left the room at the end of the morning wondering if we’d done anything of any great significance and worth.
Being a small group is hard. It’s very difficult to gain any kind of momentum, it’s hard to create a culture and it’s even harder to make the youth group feel like an exciting place to be. We’ve seen small victories recently, with our mid-week group growing from six to eight. But all it takes is for a few young people to be away and we’re back to rattling around a large room with activities that won’t work and a vaguely disheartened youth worker.
I’ve been challenged in my thinking by Matt Summerfield’s words in ‘Honey I shrunk the youth group’ (p.20) this month. According to Matt, three is the magic number. We should all only be discipling three young people at any one time – and to attempt to disciple any more would mean spreading ourselves too thinly. We may have to recruit more volunteers to make this feasible (see ‘The dream team’ on p. 38 for how to do this), so that young people aren’t left out, but we cannot simply carry on with the model we have been operating. To have a large impact, he says, we need to start small. Matt’s challenge is huge: it means a radical rethink in the way that we go about youth ministry.
Deep relationships are key, but so is feeling part of something bigger. As Jamie Cutteridge says in ‘Culture Flock’ (p.14), young people want to belong to something, a movement. The way that they cluster around particular TV shows, films, books or music, is an example of this. And, sadly, culture has – for many young people – replaced the role of the Church. No longer is Church the place they head to in order to feel part of something bigger than themselves; they resort to obsessive fandom and collective adoration of TV programmes and books to get their community fix. The Church needs to step up and reclaim its place in the lives of these young people.
This ‘bigger’ thing doesn’t have to mean big numbers, or big overwhelming vision. Jesus always broke it down for his followers. He talked of the big in the small, describing the kingdom as a mustard seed, a pearl or hidden treasure in a field. And God himself – in all of his wholeness, fullness and bigness – became small too, to help us grasp more of who he is.
Part of our role as youth workers is to communicate the big in the small, like Jesus did. Whatever the size of our groups, we must communicate God’s wider story to our young people, in such a way that they feel part of it, and own it as their story. And the truth is that my group – however small – is brilliant. It’s not a ‘group’ in fact, but more a gathering of six wonderful individuals, each of whom I get to know individually. Maybe it’s not more bodies in the room to make up the numbers that we need, just to make up the numbers. Maybe it’s not lots of other cool teenagers they can be friends with. Maybe they – and I - just need to know, deep in our souls, the huge redemption story that we are part of. And maybe that way, we won’t feel small at all.
