I’ve learnt over the years that as you work with young people in a church context, the people that are still going 30 years down the track are very often the ones you’d never believed it of and, those who showed so much promise have walked away. It’s back to Jesus’ parable that you sow the harvest and you work hard at that and you leave things to God. You invest in hope and it’s amazing what happens. I’ve learnt to get up and get on with the job of being good news and train people to share this good news of Jesus. Winston Churchill once said, ‘The art of leadership is to go from one catastrophe to another without losing any sense of enthusiasm.’ As a Christian leader you’re often in situations when it’s so hard you wonder whether it’s worth keeping going. But, with hindsight it’s amazing to see the outcomes in terms of people’s lives.
I think that there are two dangers that churches fall into: the first is that we set up a youth group and it grows to about 30 kids, we provide Bible studies and spiritual development for them. It centres around a church and it becomes all about their relationship with God, while neglecting their preparation and investment for the rest of their life. One of the dangers is that these kids grow up, grow out of the youth group and end up dropping out of church. As they leave school and go into the workplace, they’re presented with a huge number of questions and challenges that they haven’t thought about and aren’t prepared for. Conversely, there’s the church that sets about doing social stuff out in the community. There’s an equal danger in that: we meet young people’s social and emotional needs but the spiritual element of what we’re doing is lost altogether.
I’ve seen those mistakes made, but what I begin to see now is a much more useful, holistic approach to youth work developing. In the church that I lead, as part of our local responsibility, we provide education and work in hospitals with kids that come in for months afterwards and we create opportunities for them to be mentored and trained by adults. We create opportunities to engage in the community through volunteering their time. We run football training programmes, community choirs, community art work – there are all sorts of creative things going on. But, we’re also intentional about spiritual development as well as physical, relational and social development. It’s a holistic approach. It’s the kingdom of God in its fullest sense.
Church has always existed for community, but community is even more important now. When I look at the issue of Islamic radicalization and gangs which are massively out of control at the moment, the problem at core is that young people are looking for community, identity, meaning, belonging and voice. They listen to a pied piper preacher who gives them a twisted story that sends them into ISIS or a gang or whatever it might be, but what they want is to belong. As community has failed, there’s a massive opportunity for churches.
The problem at the core of so many issues is that young people are looking for community
One of the big changes since I was first involved in church youth work is that kids used to come along to church for information. The Bible study leader or minister told them what a passage meant and how to understand the world and their relationship to other people in the world. I think that modern technology has brought a huge change there. To take a caricature: someone stands up at the front of church and tells the youth group that God made the world in six days and the earth is 6,000 years old. Every kid on their smartphone is Googling and saying ‘nope’!
I became a Christian because I went to a church on Friday nights and there was a bunch of guys in their 20s who were committed, enthusiastic Christians and I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be like them because I liked them! They stood up and did little epilogues and they talked about the Bible. They were attractive. They were all musicians and they looked cool! But, they had time for me. They invested their time and energy in me and through the years, life hits you with all sorts of things, your theology changes and it grows. But I caught a love for Jesus and a love for the Bible from them. Once that fire is lit within you, you’re going to pass it on to others.
In a hi-tech, fast moving, media-driven world, where we’re bombarded by media messages every day, there’s so much information out there – what matters most is relationship. In a globalised world, locality matters more than anything else.
