Just Imagine

This is a story about giant underpants, medieval fire-eating and cardboard tanks - and how each one of them is essential to your youth work. It’s a story about going to ridiculous lengths to do things that are ridiculous, finding profound sense in nonsense or simply discovering the important in the unimportant.

But it starts with giant underpants.These are not simply extra large pants by the way - they are giant undergarments: two metres across with a carefully stitched and elasticated waistband. Made by a wonderful group of ladies in our church - who were never entirely clear about the brief, but who nevertheless, lovingly and carefully stitched and sewed ten pairs together over the course of several months. Thank you, ladies.

Not that the Fire Brigade were any clearer what was happening. It took some persuading, but finally they agreed to supply a water tank, hoses and machinery to a woodland clearing at an undisclosed location in Kent. They filled the tank and left us to it, which was probably for the best. Fire hoses snaked through the woods and connected to a washing machine sitting right in the middle of the clearing. For the technically minded among you, a pump working at eight times normal pressure, pushed water through a special contraption normally designed to fill buildings with foam in a matter of seconds.

So the scene is set and darkness is finally falling at the end of a balmy summer day. When someone flicks the switch in a moment, the whole clearing will fill with foam to the height of two metres in a matter of a few minutes. The space is lit by hundreds of fairy lights, draped across the trees. The music is ready. The group of youth workers are ready. History is ready.

In the distance, further along the path, the sound of a hundred teenagers can be heard. Their chatter turns to unfettered excitement when they finally turn the corner and see what’s before them. Like all children and young people who catch sight of a cool playground or rope swing, they simply start to run towards it. Right into the foam.

What happened next is a matter of some debate. All I know is this; there was an almighty foam battle. Everyone got soaked. At least one team managed to assemble together, find the right pair of underpants and get the entire group into them, thus declaring themselves the winners. Did I mention that the whole thing was being hosted by two grannies? Anyway, the point of all this - the months of planning and preparation, scrounging equipment for free and figuring out how to make underpants - the point of all of that is, well, no point at all. We did it for fun. To celebrate the glory of being a child and the wonder of play.

Of course, there is a point in a way. Youth work is about helping young people transition safely and securely into adulthood. As Christians, it’s also about helping young people find faith and grow in discipleship - but it’s also about helping them celebrate and live in the experience of childhood. Not everything we do has to have a teaching curriculum attached. Sometimes it’s enough just to enjoy the moment.  

Think back over what you’ve done as a youth worker in the last few months. I’d like to hope that among the serious stuff, there’s also been the chance to mess around with the young people you work with. No agenda, no ulterior motive, just having fun together.

I see that in the life of Christ in the Gospels. It seems to me that Jesus spent a lot of time simply hanging out with people, often those most looked down upon by society. He did this enough to be labeled a ‘sinner’ himself, a derogatory term for those who were considered unclean or unworthy. Food and wine were often involved and I like to think the topics of conversation varied from the deep and profound to the fun and frivolous. In other words, Jesus knew how to enjoy life. To sit and be in the company of others and to laugh and tell stories. Not everything Jesus said during those meals - or to his disciples for that matter - was a parable or a teaching point. I’m willing to bet he also knew exactly how to hang out and simply have fun.

So let’s not forget that alongside the teaching, mentoring, small group work, acts of service and all the other crucial elements of youth work, there’s also the call to give young people to space to experience the crazy, fun and downright silly side of life. Bring on the underpants I say! And the cardboard tanks.

I’d better explain the tanks. We’ve all spent a happy afternoon in a water fight with young people - in fact that kind of fun is exactly what I’m talking about. But squirting each other with water pistols is only going to keep everyone interested for so long. We needed to inject a creative twist and the answer lay in huge cardboard boxes the size of chest freezers. Ten of those, with windows cut and turrets added, and suddenly you have a different kind of water fight. Imagine five tanks at one end of the field - with the boxes turned over and three or four young people underneath, legs poking out and water guns pushed through the window slots. At the other end, another five tanks for the opposing team. Now that’s a water fight! Whatever passers-by thought of ten large boxes moving around a park I don’t know. But it was fun.

Many other activities and crazy events have followed. A medieval fair complete with monks on bungee cords, volleyball in the pitch dark, illuminated only by ultra-violet lights, and assembling giant catapults to rain down cabbages on the enemy. (Before you ask, yes, it’s all risk-assessed to within an inch of its life, costs almost nothing and the only person to get hit by a cabbage on that occasion, as it happens, was my wife.)

Whilst these activities don’t tend to take large budgets, they do require creativity and a playful sense of fun. Youth workers should have both in plentiful supply.

Creativity is one of those traits that is often believed to be a mysterious blessing bestowed upon a few people at birth. You’ve either got it or you haven’t. Some people are creative and others aren’t, right?

Rubbish. It’s a mistake to think of creativity as producing something new like a new song, poem, painting, or book. Creativity is certainly involved in making art. However, creativity is much more than that. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to work or solve problems in our everyday lives. All people have the capacity to be creative. We can also nurture  and increase our creativity.

There’s a popular idea that logic is a ‘left brain’ activity and that creativity and emotions are ‘right brain’ activities. But that’s an oversimplification of how our brains normally work. The idea was popularised from research that studied 40 people whose brains had been surgically severed between the left and right sides to control seizures. Most of us, thankfully, do not have split brains. The left and right sides of our brains actually seem to work very well together, and creativity does not reside in one side or the other of the brain. Like everyone else on this planet, you are a creative person. You may think more logically than others, or find it easier to conjure new ideas out of nothing, but that’s just different ways to be creative.

So don’t imagine for a moment that you can’t come up with some crazy ideas of your own to enjoy with young people this summer. You can - and you should. In these austerity- filled days, it seems more important than ever to simply have fun with young people. But how and where do you start? Here’s how we’ve ended up developing some of our events and activities.

1. Throw out the old...

Don’t just repeat what you did last year. Always have a summer ‘It’s a Knockout’ event? Scrap it this year and do something different. Go ice-skating every term? Try something else. There’s a temptation to keep repeating things if they’re successful  but you’ll almost certainly experience the law of diminishing returns. It’s much better to move on and try something new. Force yourself to come up with a new idea and you’ll often find you not only manage to do it, but it’s even better than the one you already tried.

2. ...and give space for the new

Creative ideas don’t always just pop into your head. It’s a little time and effort to come up with something really fun and different. The best way to do that is to put aside some specific time to generate new ideas. As a general rule, the more ideas you have at this point, the better. Don’t try to rationalise or evaluate them, however strange they may sound, and don’t worry about how feasible they sound, they can always be scaled back. Keep a scrapbook - literally or digitally - of ideas and things you’ve seen that you could develop and adapt. That’s how we came up with a snow event in the middle of summer - watching a movie one night, I realised that film sets must have equipment that produces snow when it’s needed. A quick bit of research, a few phone calls and I found myself in possession of just such a machine for our summer camp. Throw in some dogs and sleds (thank you Association of Husky Dogs of Great Britain), and you have a snow ball fight in the middle of a hot summer. Why not?

3. Do the twist

Sometimes it helps to take something you’ve done before and ask yourself if it could be changed in some way that turns it into a totally new experience. So your ‘It’s a Knockout’ event could be held in a hired swimming pool instead of a field and take place entirely in water. Or on ponies, or llamas. Stay with me - not in water, I’m back on the field. And you can hire both llamas and ponies, by the way. But not lions. Try going back over what you’ve done before and asking if putting it in a different context can turn into something completely new.

4. Put in the work

Creativity doesn’t mean there won’t be hard work involved in making things happen. Most great events and ideas require a lot of effort and planning. Be prepared to go the extra mile and you’ll be amazed at what’s possible. We had an idea for a giant maze - we tried to talk farmers into letting us create one in a maize field, but in the end we settled on giant cardboard boxes - turns out they come in handy for all kinds of things! Finding a couple of hundred cardboard boxes for free, especially huge ones, isn’t easy. Turns out you have to phone a lot of companies before you find one that will give you some. It also turns out they’re in the mountains of Wales. But it was worth the long journey and the effort. We turned a whole church into a box maze, including the baptismal pool. Three hundred teenagers spent many happy hours getting lost in it over the course of a weekend. It’s worth the effort.

5. Never lose your sense of fun

Of course you’ll want to spend valuable hours with young people talking about what’s important to them. You’ll want to cry with them when they face disaster or are in pain. You’ll want to mentor and guide them as they navigate teenage life. But don’t forget to have fun. To celebrate life in big and small ways. No one can organise a box maze every weekend, but maybe once a year you can do something that is so wonderfully, gloriously mad and creative, they’ll be talking about it for the rest of their lives. In doing so, perhaps without you realising, you’ll have also reminded them that they’re worth the effort. All that planning and persuading and preparation was because of them. Because having riotous fun should be part of childhood. And part of your - and my - job as youth workers is to remind them of that. With or without the giant underpants.

Agree with this ? Disagree ? We want your feedback! Email youthwork@premier.org.uk and let us know what you think.