HERE I WAS ON A SATURDAY NIGHT FACED WITH THE COMPLETE HORROR OF THE SILENT COUNTRYSIDE
Seven o’clock on a Saturday evening and it’s my night off. As I head into the living room to fire up the TV for a night of tacky dating shows, singing contests, football highlights and leftovers from youth clubs, I stop and notice that something’s not quite right. I open up the front door and stand outside only to be confronted with a very unfamiliar sound... complete silence. This isn’t the rapture, this is rural Cheshire.
Just over two years ago I was a freshly qualified youth worker, having completed a two year internship with a large, vibrant church in South Manchester. I had been partly responsible for the day-to-day running of the church’s youth clubs, through which we connected with over 60 young people each week. When my internship came to an end, I was ready to head out on my own and the only question was where to go? Manchester? Liverpool? Australia? The world truly was my oyster and I was fired up and ready to go. Yet here I was on a Saturday night faced with the complete horror of the silent countryside.
HOW ON EARTH DID I END UP HERE?
In the search for jobs I found myself drawn to one advertised as a youth and young families’ worker in the United Benefice of Norley, Crowton and Kingsley. I had just two questions: what’s a United Benefice and where on earth are Norley, Crowton and Kingsley? After a bit of research I discovered the answers were ‘a joint benefice’ and ‘somewhere in Cheshire’.
When I arrived for my interview, I experienced a wee bit of what can only be described as culture shock. After previously working in a large and busy town, there was no heavy traffic forcing its way through the streets, no police sirens wailing in the distance, and most shockingly of all not a Tesco or even Tesco Express in sight! It felt like I’d landed in an episode of Last of the summer wine and half-expected to see Compo and Nora Batty sliding down a hill in a bathtub on wheels any minute. Yet despite my own ignorance and apprehension, God began to open up doors and I ended up with the job. It turned out that this church had never had a youth worker before and I was charged with the job of building a youth ministry from scratch. As there were only six young people in the church, and just one youth club being run by two volunteers the task seemed mammoth. But two years later, ‘NCK Youth’ is up and running.
THE MISSION FIELD
Such is the geographical spread of the benefice that the youth work stretches out over three parishes. Between those we have a Friday night youth club, a Sunday youth fellowship group, a Messy Church, a Sunday school, a youth café, local schools work and the occasional youth trips out of the village. But don’t let this idyllic setting of a rural youth ministry fool you. It’s not all straight forward. After working in mostly urban areas of the UK, a lot of projects which had previously worked in my last post just didn’t seem to take off here.
Although many young people in rural areas benefit from gross material wealth, the level of social deprivation can be staggering. When putting on an event, many young people are simply unable to get there. Buses don’t run in the evenings and the youth club may be a three mile walk from your house down a dark country road. If you can’t count on the taxi of Mum and Dad, then you’re stuck! This means that I’ve had countless situations where I’ve put on a youth night and only four or five young people have been able to make it. This would get me down and lead me to question whether or not I was meant to be here, but the reality is that young people have simply been left stranded at home.
The f lip side to this is that many families have realised that if their children are to get out of the house, then they’ll need to join an organised club. This can be anything from Scouting and Girl Guiding, to sailing and rowing clubs. Some of the young people I’ve encountered in this area are busier than most adults! When you work in an affluent area with an abundance of organised clubs already in motion, how do you even begin to compete? A table tennis set and PS3 in our youth room just doesn’t seem to cut it. Why pay 50p to use ours when you already have these things at home?
The reality was that my previous style of doing youth ministry wasn’t working. Every youth work book or article that you come across tends to focus on urban ministry -where do you go for advice in a rural setting?
MY FARM’S BIGGER THAN YOUR FARM
As youth workers we sometimes fall into the old school playground trap of the ‘my dad’s better than your dad’. After venturing out further into Cheshire, I would come across other youth workers and inevitably the ‘how big is your youth group’ question came up. After just about every conversation I would find myself asking myself what I was doing wrong.
My friends and church family were supportive, stating classic lines like ‘Jesus only had twelve’, but the level of guilt I used to feel (and at times still do) was immense. I was judging the success of the youth ministry based on quantity, not quality, spending hours thinking ‘If only...’ and by the end of this destructive cycle of thinking would become exhausted and useless for the next few days.
It’s also very isolating being in a rural setting. Many sole youth workers struggle with this in even the best of situations, and being the 20-30s section of my church can make spiritual growth as a 26 year-old significantly harder. In many rural areas, young people tend to move out of the village once they hit their late teens and do not return until their mid-40s due to the cost of living. Whenever I’m in need of a pick-me-up from a good friend, it usually involves me driving at least half an hour out of the village, typically late at night, after youth club has finished. But in the midst of this, I began to realise I was missing the point.
THAT’LL DO PIG
As I was judging the success of my ministry by how many young people were attending each week I ended up ignoring the little glimmers of hope that were occurring right before my eyes. I was failing to notice that five of our older youth club members were consistently attending every week. I was failing to notice that the relationships the youth team and I had with them were becoming stronger and stronger. They began to let us into their world and open up about life at home and school. We were able to speak to them about faith, and before we knew it were attending Christian gigs with us alongside the young people from church (providing we went to McDonalds on the return journey home). Two of them started to come along to our youth fellowship group on a Sunday night.
When I look back now, I can hardly believe that I didn’t rejoice more when all this was occurring. I had become so engrossed with the numbers game that all of my joy had been blind-sided with the cheap lies of success. I had failed to take into account that Jesus isn’t into the numbers game either. He will honour any group of any size and will work with whatever tools you have at your disposal. Every single one of those five young people came to Soul Survivor with us last year and made their first time commitments to faith. Our God does indeed live outside of the city walls!
If you are working in a rural church setting, here are my top five tips for surviving
Never base the success of your group on attendance.
When I began to focus on the numbers game, I lost sight of what God was doing with the few who were attending. If it hadn’t of been for good friends and fellow youth volunteers pointing me in the right direction, I would have potentially missed out on the incredible work that God was doing among our young people.
Line management.
I cannot stress just how important it is to have good line management in rural youth work. When working in such isolated areas, you can often feel very alone in your job, and having nobody to review projects and share ideas with can limit the success of what you are doing. In these meet-ups I am able to share the work I am carrying out in the benefice, but also get a chance to vent out my own personal frustrations and heartbreaks. Even if your line manager cannot solve the problems you have, just having somebody who will allow you to off load on them for an hour can often bring you to the right conclusions.
Get out of the village!
Unless you’re wanting to join the cast of The League of Gentlemen, you’d be wise to get out of the village every so often. Being disconnected from the rest of the world can easily rob you of the injections of new ideas and fresh passion that are so vital. Whether it’s attending a training day in a neighboring city, or just meeting up with a good friend for coffee, getting outside of village life is essential.
Share your vision with the church.
If youth ministry is completely new to your church, or you’re simply the first person under 30 they’ve seen in the last century, then it’s probably a good idea to keep them well informed about what you’re doing. The more people you manage to get alongside you in a shared vision for the church, the easier your ride will be. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that people are not interested, simply because they do not ask how it’s going. Youth ministry is still relatively new in some parts of the United Kingdom, and many congregation members will need to be brought up to date on this ‘new venture’.
Keep your head up!
When working in a rural setting, it’s easy to believe that you are not making any difference in your church and the community around you. Numbers can be small, the lack facilities can be restrictive, volunteers can be somewhat non-existent, and getting young people to and from an event can be near enough impossible! But don’t give up! Young people in all areas need the gospel, and it’s often when we are on our knees begging God to intervene, that he is doing his most powerful work through us.
JOE SMITH is the youth and young families worker at St Johns Church, Kingsley.
