Faith Formation in a Post-Christendom World. Part 1: Challenging our assumptions. By Jonny Price

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This week, Jonny Price, Youth and Children’s Ministry Leader in York, returns to give us some insight faith formation with a post-Christendom culture. This will be a two part series, so check back for the next post soon.

Faith formation is important. Good faith formation is very important! How we do good faith formation has been the pre-occupation of Christian youth work for quite a while, and quite rightly, but there have been some significant changes over the last several decades that we maybe haven’t taken into account.

Christendom refers to the culture that exists when the Christian narrative has had a significant impact on the shape of that culture, and wide acceptance of that narrative is apparent. Post-Christendom is what emerges when the Christian narrative loses the central ground in that culture.

The decline of Christendom has been going on for quite a while, but for many in the Church it is still the narrative they hold on to in order to make sense of how faith and culture should hold together. It’s seen as a bit of a golden age of when people knew the Christian story and the Church was central to the life of the nation. Without Christendom you wouldn’t have conversations about the decline of Bible knowledge in wider society or the view that Christian values are normal.

So what assumptions do we need to challenge in ourselves (myself included) when we start to think about good faith formation in a post-Christendom culture?

1. Worship is a religious activity

Within Christendom there were a widely accepted set of values that were largely based on the Christian narrative. In such a society, what would mark someone out as being a Christian? It would be participation in the life of a local worshipping community. If that is the case, then ‘worship’ becomes a religious activity.

That, however, is not the way that the Bible uses the word worship. Worship is about the way we live our lives, the way we make decisions, the way that we treat those around us and move through the world. It’s making a big deal of God in all that we do.

When the Israelites worship other gods in the Old Testament, it causes them serious problems. Yes, there were religious practices associated with other gods that they participated in, but they were also living in ways that actively opposed who God was. Worship is about living in righteousness, a point made again and again through the Prophets – not simply about participating in religious activity.

If we carry this assumption into our faith formation, then being a Christian becomes a hobby or a pastime, rather than a way of moving through the world.

2. Information transfer is the same as character formation

This is almost impossible to avoid because of the way in the West we value intellectual thought and how we link academic achievement to personal wellbeing. If a person knows the right things, they will do well in life, and so we do the same in our faith formation. Many faith formation models, therefore, can essentially be boiled down to simple getting tricky bits of information into the minds of people.

But as mentioned above, when we look at the Bible, righteousness is the aim of passing on faith, not simply information retention. We should be aiming for developing people who put love of God and others before themselves, and who try to live their lives in that way.

Yes there is information that we do need to pass on for that to happen, but passing on information alone is not all that is needed.

3. Belief and faith mean no more than agreement

Most of the time belief is used to signal just how passionately a person thinks about a certain idea. Faith is used in a similar way, to show how someone thinks positively about an idea despite what the evidence shows. Think back to the last time you heard the word ‘believe’ used in public discourse. I am willing to bet it was used to emphasise just how much a person thought an idea would work.

Both these words are used to signal agreement with an idea, but little else. They are not associated with action or with ways of living, but with intellectual assent to an idea.

Faith and belief are all encompassing words to describe our wholehearted commitment to God. One of the most important things for good faith formation, I think, is changing the way we approach faith and belief. We will think more on this in part 2.

4. Faith formation is about institutional stability

With the decline of Christendom, much has been made of the inability of the church to pass on its faith to the next generation. The background assumption to this is that if we can get faith formation right, we can slow or reverse the decline.

What does this make the next generation? If we don’t challenge this assumption, then our young people we be reduced simply to resources. They become numbers on counting sheets.

What if the decline of Christendom is alright? What if it’s what is needed for the Church to be renewed? What if following Jesus in a post-Christendom context has little to do with institutional membership? What if God’s plan for the next generation has little to do with our institutional entrenchment?

Conclusion

There are some half-finished thoughts here that will be rounded up in part 2, when I explore what good faith formation might look like in a post-Christendom context.

 

Photo by Stefan Kunze on Unsplash

The youth ministry idol of new

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Youth Ministry sits on the the cutting edge of contemporary missionary theory, and fresh expressions of church theology. We pride ourselves on being innovators, creatives, and revolutionaries.

Throw a new year into the mix and we have a skittish spasm of fresh ideas, along with a fidgety, impatient sense of ‘let’s change everything – right now!’

The new year is often the time that we change all the programs, layouts, teaching themes, leaders, logos – everything. We support this random change of track by pointing out that youth culture itself changes every five minutes, and that we have a missional responsibility to be on trend or even ahead of the curve. We need to stay fresh, or we’ll go stale.

We do like new don’t we? Hence the postmodern mantra, new year, new me.

This should leave us with a pertinent question though: What was wrong with the old me? When it comes to our personal new year resolutions the answers might come easily. I’m too out of shape, too disorganised, too isolated, too social, etc. I gotta fix all of the toos. It’s great to work on self improvement, but also easy to forget that we just spent a year teaching on the value of identity in Christ that isn’t caught up in these things. Mixed signals perhaps?

When it comes to youth ministry, these mixed signals go into a blender. We – sometimes completely tactlessly – take what we and our teams have poured our lives into, screw it into a ball, and start all over again. All for the sake of something new.

When you start something new to replace something you’ve been doing a while you create some baggage, and leave a wake of confusion. What, for instance, happens to the legacy of your ministry, the value of the hours of tears and hard work that went into it, or the period of necessary settling before an idea really starts to work. When you keep starting something ‘new’ you consistently devalue what was before.

The thing is though, God works with journeys, with time, and with settlement. He honours toil and dedication, and he loves constancy and consistency. Oddly, these are all the things young people value too.

Sometimes we do need to make big changes to our youth ministries, or start something completely new, but there should be a lot of caveats first, such as:

  • Did we really give this time to settle and form?
  • Are we adding yet another shaky inconsistency into our teenagers lives?
  • Have we properly identified, addressed, and worked the issues?
  • Are we properly resourced for this ‘new’ thing?
  • Did we bring everyone with us?
  • Did we try to bring people with us?
  • Are we avoiding a real issue by bouncing off it?

New can be an idol. In a Youth Ministry world of fresh ideas, cool stories, and funky logos it’s all too easy for us to be caught up and surrender the high ground of constancy, for the rivers of skittish change.

Let’s send down some roots this year – give our world and people the time they need to form and settle, and seek fresh encounters with God where we are at with who we are with.

Let’s maybe give the old a chance.

7 Ways to Support Anorexic Young People

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Last night my wife and I watched the BBC2 documentary with Louis Theron on Anorexia, which has prompted this post.

Youth ministries can be rife with all kinds of eating disorders – and classically we respond to this epidemic by simply talking about self image and inner value. As if we could convince them that they are beautiful, then they’ll suddenly get better and start eating normally again. Messages on identity are genuinely important, but rarely do they adequately address the needs of a young person dealing with a diagnosed mental disorder like anorexia.

And that’s where we should start. Diagnosed anorexia is treated in mental health departments. It is often wrapped up in anxiety, paranoia, and other chemical vulnerabilities in the mind. This means that the condition, the symptoms, and the treatments are dramatically different depending on personality.

  • For some young people, anorexia means a pathological and carnal phobia of food, and what eating does to their bodies.
  • For others, it is a form of self-harm or punishment; a painful response to inordinate guilt or a denial of things they feel they don’t deserve.
  • For some it is a response to trauma or tragedy – a way of making change happen to be more acceptable to themselves or others.
  • For again others, it creates a numbness that enables them to deal with other painful or overwhelming feelings.

Thus you will find young people who are filled with shame about how they deal with eating and exercise – and they will hide from you. You will then find others who are proud, and even militant about their sense of confused piety and discipline. Some will have no intention of recovery, and others will have no acceptance of their problem. More than likely, however, several of these things will exist together in a constant state tension and battle.

Anorexia – like any mental health problem – is never clean lined or simple.

It also comes with all kinds of misunderstandings and resentment. ‘Why don’t you just eat more?’ or ‘Don’t you know that you look better with more meat on your bones!’ As if they could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and think suddenly objectively or rationally.

Anorexia smothers rational thinking. It comes with intense feelings of guilt, fear, judgement and social anxiety – and it proffers its own destructive solutions.

So what do we do about it as youth leaders?

1. Remember that we are not doctors.

We’re not psychologists, psychiatrists, key-workers, or mental health nurses. Our job is not treatment, or job is support.

We should remember to work with professionals and to recommend or report to them to do what we can’t.

2. Treat them like distinct and individual people

Mental health needs a fuller understanding across the board. I’ve tried to demonstrate above some of the many different ways young people might experience this condition. Each of them will need a different response and will play by a different set of rules.

We can’t learn broad responses – we need to work with them individually.

3. Ask them what they need

Allow them to speak into their own condition, and to help you understand what language they need. This will also help you be able to look out for their triggers and provide for the care of those triggers in your projects.

4. Love them unconditionally

It’s easy to get frustrated by conditions that we can’t understand. But our job isn’t to fix young people – it’s to lead them to Jesus. There are few things that do this better than creating a safe place of love and security in your ministry.

5. Don’t enable

Make sure you know enough of them, and have spent enough time with their family – and maybe even nurses or social workers – to be able to help them recover. This means creating similar boundaries within your projects for them as they’ll be experiencing at home.

6. Be for their recovery

Show that your proud of them when they’re doing well and when they’re working with doctors. Mental health conditions tend to come with a pathological suspicion of treatment. Help them with encouragement that they’re doing the right thing by getting help.

7. Don’t minimise their experience

Whatever kind of grip eating disorders have, or whatever form they take, they are always destructive. Be careful not to demonise or trivialise conditions like anorexia in how you joke or talk. Always here young people out and take them seriously about what it is they’re feeling – whether or not you can relate.

Youth Work USP

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What is your Youth Work USP? What do you bring to the table that other young people’s activities don’t?

Often completely alien to the compassion and chaos of the youth work world is the cold and competitive rigours of business. The latter is where USP – that’s unique service provision or unique selling point – comes from.

You might believe that business, sales and marketing strategies should have nothing to do with Christ-saturated youth ministry. You may believe that I’m leading you into a callous, sub-biblical and secular world of professionalism. You may also believe that I’ve simply watched too many episodes of The Apprentice – which might possibly be true!

The truth is, however, that you are probably already employing such strategies – albeit under the guise of mission statements, vision casting and prayer meetings. Business uses different language to ask effectively the same question: how can we best steward resources to have the biggest possible effect?

USP is key to this and incredibly important to nail if you want to succeed in youth work.

If you cannot clearly articulate and communicate what it is that your programs uniquely offer to young people that is above all the other trappings of the world, then they have no reason to join you.

If you can’t say loud and proud what makes your offerings so much better than a Friday night on the slosh, or a Sunday morning xbox fest, then it could account for why you only have three people showing up!

Too many youth programs hide their unique services and values under generic activities that are also provided by just about every other competing activity. Live music and entertainment can be gotten from loads of places – it’s called youtube and a sneaky pint.

Your Youth Work USP

What is it you do that other potential activities don’t?

– Do you offer a safe and compassionate community where outcasts are welcome and accepted?
– Is it direction on how to connect to the maker of the universe?
– Are you giving opportunities to feed the poor and help the homeless?
– Do you give help becoming a holistic person?
– Are you offering the key to fulfilment found in Jesus?

What is your USP? Find it, nail it, and clearly communicate it!

The USP of one of my groups is a welcome invitation to be part of a family that takes care of each other and seeks truth together. This means my ‘youth group’ works for ages 11-25, and is full of both fun activities and spiritually searching worship and study.

This USP attracts many young people who feel isolated and rejected in their own family, and it attracts those who are interested in philosophy and spirituality more generally. The USP drives what we do each night and helps form the culture of questioning, mentoring and peer-to-peer care outside the meeting times. We’ve seen many young people saved from this group!

If you want to attract spiritually aware, community producing, open-to-Jesus young people – then ‘market’ that as your USP in all of your publicity materials. That niche will be on the lookout and they will come!

Once you have developed and grown those young people, then you can set your sights broader as young people will always attract more young people. Too many of us do that backwards – start with an impossibly broad club that competes with secular groups and then try to niche it down. We overfeed on hype which seemingly works well for a couple of years (without a lot of commitments to Jesus to show for it), then we crash, burn and close down.

Find your USP! Be proud of it. Market to it and develop those who come. Then you can build a broader mission strategy off the back of that community. Winner.

More info

If you’d like to think about how to find your USP, check out an article I wrote for leadanyone.com here. If you’d like personal help developing your USP, understanding how to more clearly articulate it or building a group off it, then get in touch via the training page. Thanks!

How To Be The Ideal Youth Worker

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What makes an ideal youth worker ideal? What ingredients do you need to add to the mix? What specific traits and skills should we be developing to fill holes in our youth worker template?

This was a brilliant question posed to me in a training session this morning. I’m going to attempt to summarise my answer here.

There are several tiers to an ‘ideal’ youth worker starting with the nonnegotiable and working down to specific specialised skills. All of these should be developing, growing and organic.

We all love diagrams right? Here’s one I made earlier.

There are no ideal youth workers, we all know this, and every youthworker will be different depending on context. However I feel these principles are mostly transferable. They are the basis for what I expect from myself and my teams. They also form the framework of my interview process.

Love For God & Young People

At the top of the pyramid are the most important: a love for God and a love for young people – and a keen flow between these two. If you don’t have these you’re following the wrong trail.

F.A.T.

Second we see the key traits of longevity; faithfulness, a commitment to God, people, projects and ministry life; availability, a – within safe boundaries(!) – accessibility to people and projects; and teachability – a proactive willingness to learn and grow that is accountable and open.

Commitment to …

This tier contains the essential faith-driven lifestyle commitments: An ever growing passion for reading the bible, prayer and worship personally and within community.

Development of…

Here we see specific skills that will be useful regularly in all kinds of youth work. Listening skills are always valuable, as is the ability to think and problem solve creatively. A growing theological understanding is also important, alongside learning different ways to communicate this understanding. Finally it’s key that every youth leader is trained in best safeguarding practice.

Specialising in…

The final tier includes the main areas where a youth leader should think about specialising. Not all of these will be essential to every youth worker.

Relational practice can be developed in many ways, but comes down to forming lasting, impressionable bonds with young people. Activity basis is taking specific gifts, talents and passions that you have and developing them in ministry contexts, for instance sport, music, drama, debate or knitting.

Inclusivity is always important but will rely on your context. This may include working alongside various ages, social and health difficulties, specific cultures or members of the LGBT community. Similar to this is working with those with different learning styles; key if you are doing lots of communication work and schools projects.

Parental support is particularly valuable if you’re doing church-based ministry as family worship is always the end goal. Finally management is vital if you’re overseeing projects and people.

This last tier is always the least important and is always the area that changes most throughout your youth work experience.

How to apply this in team management

These five tiers should form the basis of in house growth and training.

You should have the top two tiers sown solidly into the regular fabric of your projects, ministry and recruitment process.

The third tier is checked up on through community involvement (generally) and through regular individual supervision sessions (specifically). I try to do individual supervision in various ways once every 6 months, and team supervision annually.

The last two tiers should form the basis of group training that you run and attend. The top of these should be three-line-whip sessions for the whole team with regular annual repeats, and training for the last should be made available to those who want it.

 

 

3 Reasons Why I’m Learning Welsh as a Youthworker

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S’mae. Bore Da. Tim Dw i. Dw i dysgy Cymraeg. Dw i ofnadwy!
Y’alright? Good morning. I’m Tim. I’m learning Welsh. I’m pants!

Why am I learning Welsh? Here’s three reasons:

There are schools and areas that are first language Welsh.

Although most, if not all Welsh speakers will also speak English, this will not be the natural, native first language. It can be more difficult to find a word in English than Welsh. Some of these schools will not let you in unless you are at least reasonably bilingual. You are after all in a different country.

Welsh is the heart language of Wales.

People by nature respond better when you communicate to them in the language that is near, dear and natural to their heart. This is making a cultural effort that is always responded to well.

It gives me an immediate common learning experience with every young person in Wales.

Bar very few, every young person in Wales is learning Welsh. This means I have an immediate point of connection, of humour, of learning and of conversation. Sometimes I will start a conversation with the young person in Welsh when I meet them for the first time because you can almost guarantee you will be laughing with each other within a minute. This also means I come from an area of less knowledge and they are able to teach me. It’s humble and it’s fun.

If you’re interested in learning Welsh there are many great courses. I’m taking Bangor Universitie’s Cwrs Wlpan which is always very highly rated and recommended.

From Detached to Disciple by Andy & Laura Hancock

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This was a live blog for Youthwork, The Conference originally published here.

 

Husband and Wife double team, Youth Pastor Andy and YFC Church Resources Manager Laura will be moving us through the journey from detached to disciple – from first contact to Jesus follower. From ‘park bench to life group.’

It’s the last morning of Youthwork, the Conference 2014. The last seminar. People are gathering with a little bit less pace and a little more silent contentment than yesterday. The last day blues are setting in.

However, even through our minds are on the journey home, the luggage stored in the hotel lock up and the slowly increasing weight of our inboxes – there is still a feeling of anticipation and expectancy. This seminar is covering a vital topic.

How do we go from that very first meeting with a young person to a place where we are confident that we will know them in heaven? How do we help young people make these transitions in a healthy and organic way? How do we move young people from detached to disciple?

Andy and Laura will be telling us stories of what has worked in their local church in Halesowen and how they have helped young people be part of their church community.

  (Sorry about any dodgy spelling or awkward grammar – this is a live blog!)

A couple of caveats…

Attendance in church is not the endgame. Bums on seats is not the idea. However an increasing membership in the community is a good indicator of healthy youth work.

Andy and Laura want us to know that they’re not claiming what they’re doing is the best model of youthwork. There are many areas where they are praying for a breakthrough. Think strategically at how you can apply these stories to your own local context. Some of these stories and ideas will work, some will not.

Moving on…

Youth workers by nature tend to be incredible at relationship building. Youth leaders need this too; the ability to be there for young people and to invest in their lives. However we should as youth workers also be committed to building relationships with the friends of the young people that we know. This is a great place to start strategically thinking about how to gather more young people on this journey to follow Jesus.

Strategy in youth ministry though is not something that’s talked about very much. At a recent training course, youth leaders we’re asked if they had a clear coherent strategy for their youthwork. 1 in 50 said yes.

Trying to distill a clear strategy from youth projects can be like getting blood from a stone. Youthwork is often chaotic and messy and this is great, but it’s also missing the clear intentionality needed to bring people along on a journey to Jesus and into the church community.

What’s a win?

We know we’re doing a good job if a young person is following Jesus and making disciples of their mates when they are 25 years old. It’s about the long game. Not ‘are they a Christian today?’ but are they being equipped to follow Jesus in the long term?

When we pack for holiday we checklist off all the things we will need to pack. The same is true for youth work. We need to consider what to teach and impart that will equip our young people long term.

For Andy’s youth ministry there are 7 principles that they continually teach – and these will make their way in some form to the new Youth For Christ Resources. Two of these are teaching the young people to make wise decisions, and equipping them to fall more in love with Jesus so that they will tell their mates.

Thinking strategically about the journey

This is a movement of real young people on a journey from outreach, to a followup space to, to intentional discipleship and finally to church community.

It’s not always clear cut, some young people come and go at various stages and some don’t fit in into this at all. However this progression demonstrates how a strategically thought out journey can move young people through to relationship with Jesus.

The basic pattern begins with outreach where they go into young people’s own territory in schools and on the streets. Moving on from this into a large open youth group that’s looked after by committed Christians with the skills needed to mingle and talk about Jesus.

This youth group is like the ground floor of Debenhams. You can spend as long as you want down there but at some point you will want to find the elevator to the next level. That elevator is the Alpha course and the next level is the Life Groups.

Life Groups create an intentional, unapologetic discipleship space. They use accessible language to talk Bible, prayer, spiritual gifts and church. Here they provide a safe environment to prepare young people to be part of the church community.

The final stage of this journey is to belong to the church community. It’s vital that you prepare both the church itself and the young people for this.

To make each transition as easy as possible Andy and Laura use the same team and the same venue. This makes each new group feel safe and familiar. Great idea!

If a wife and husband are miles apart, say the husband in Eastbourne and the wife in London, they only need one form of transport – a car – to see each other. However if the wife moves to Brazil they will need to change vehicles mid journey to see each other.

The same is true for a quality youth work strategy. To help a young person journey through, you will need to change vehicles. You can’t necessarily hope that just schools work or just a youth group will do it. You need to help them through by adapting to their needs.

Your approach trumps your goal. Unless your approach adapts, you won’t reach your goal. You need to constantly make decisions to help reach your goal.

Finishing up

Andy summed up the session like this: Teach your church young people to love Jesus and create spaces that are comfortable enough for them to invite their non-church friends too.

It’s important to think strategically and commit that strategy totally to God.

Unless the Lord builds the house,
the builders labour in vain. [Psalm 127:1a]

A few quotable quotes!

There were huge chunks of wisdom given in this seminar and a fair few nuggets of wise one-liners too. Here’s a few:

“The only barrier for young people becoming a Christian should be the cross. We don’t want as church to put any more barriers in the way of meeting with him.”

“Youth work success is not when a young person meets with Jesus. Success is when they make a step on their journey.”

“A win at the youth group is when a young person feels safe and comfortable enough to come back and bring a friend.”

“I want to do everything I can to get young people in front of the cross, in front of Jesus.”

Youthwork in Wales… some thoughts

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Youthwork in Wales. After just 3 and a half years working in Wales I’m anything but an expert! I am, however, a learner, and I’ve put together these quick thoughts as a result of my own growing observation and conversations in the Welsh-ministry world. I would of course heartily welcome any feedback from experienced Welsh pastors and youth workers in order to grow and adapt these thoughts. I am holding them loosely and (I hope) with an open hand.

Most of my experience is in North Wales… creeping into Mid Wales, with very little in South Wales (other than some epic holidays and knowing some amazing people). So I guess I’m mostly talking about the North here.

I’m an Englishman living in Wales. My ancestry is Welsh, I became a Christian in the town which I now work, and I am in love with the culture here and never felt more at home. I am, however, definitely English (watching the World Cup proved that!) – so do take my observations lightly.

 

Big, Whopping Preliminary Thought:

– Wales really is a whole other country! Let’s treat it that way. I have another post on this topic here.

 

What We Have

– Wales is beautiful! I have a friend who has been working in Wales for a long time who once said ‘when God made the Earth He started with Wales.’ I think my friend was right! Wales is gorgeous, rich, and diverse – and perfect geographically for outdoor pursuits! There is lots available (mountaineering, canoeing, climbing, surfing) within easy driving reach of each other and easy reach of town bases. This is one of the key reasons that Welsh Youth Camps are so successful.

– Legacy. There is a proud and broad Church and missionary history in Wales. There are many countries (such as India and South Korea) that still view Wales as their spiritual home. Don’t forget the epic Welsh revival(s) just over a century ago, and the founding of charities like Scripture Union and The International Beach Mission. This gives people huge pride in – and openness to – ministry, particularly with a view to mission.

– Unity. Another friend I’ve made here settled in Wales after working for years globally with people like Billy Graham. He told me just last week that he hasn’t seen such an unprecedented level of churches and charities working together anywhere else in the entire world… Go Wales! There are disagreements and factions of course, but when it comes to mission there is a huge willingness to pool resources and march forward. I spoke at a camp last week that had people involved from Young Life, Urban Saints, and YFC which was attended by a huge range of denominations. There was no ‘look at us’ and a whole load of ‘look at JESUS!’

– Multicultural… but not like what you’re thinking. Wales’s as a culture is split several ways, but what you really notice is the incredible Celtic heritage bleeding through the older Welsh communities, particularly from the West Coast. This heritage is spiritually aware, open and ready to hear about the mysteries of God in a unique way. The Welsh language is also incredibly rich, broad and adds a whole host of considerations for ministry.

– Community driven. Much of North Wales still feels like a village community. This bleeds through into Church and School culture and makes community projects and particularly events that cross the age spectrum work really well.

– Love of creative arts. Wales has an ancient history with art and creativity, and this forms many of the foundation blocks of its culture. Art galleries, poetry, folk music, architecture, sculpture and theater are mainstays of just about every Welsh settlement – and should be taken seriously for Welsh ministry.

– The highest poverty in the UK. Almost a quarter, 23% against England’s 22% and Scotland’s 18%. When you consider population sizes that’s huge!About 700,000 people in Wales living under the breadline. Further, the cuts have damaged the Welsh working poor more than the rest of the UK. By 2015-16 tax payers in Wales will be paying £900 million a year for benefit reforms.

– Highest Child Poverty in the UK. About 15% live in what’s described as severe poverty in Wales. Read more about poverty in Wales here and here.

 

What We Don’t Have

– Clinical resources and support groups. There are, for instance, no clearly advertised self harm support networks across the whole of North Wales. Waiting lists for NHS counsellors are huge, and there are few local competitive free-lancers. There are a lot of emotional needs that go unaddressed in North Wales because of the lack of support.

*edit (2015) – Mind, the Mental Health Charity, are pushing hard to make inroads to remedy some of the above.

– Up-to-date First Language Welsh Resources. There are groups like SU who are working hard to remedy this, but much of the Welsh resources for young people are old! Google Translate and Babblefish simply do not work for Welsh! There is a huge need for properly translated modern songs, Bibles and youth resources. This is a need, but an incredibly niche huge market, so good luck trying to convince the publishers!

– Crowds. For some perspective, North Wales has the same population as Sheffield. I once tried to run a crowd event just for Christian young people in a North Wales town where I had only 20 or so show up. This was really disappointing until I realised that those 20 constituted about 80% of the Christian youth in that town! If you want to run crowd events across a larger area though, you are plagued by geography. We need something other than standard crowd events to build wider community here.

– Large school districts. The largest areas of North Wales only have a couple of Schools serving them, and in some cases these school populations have been coached in from miles away. Cross-school based projects are going to struggle, as is any group or project that depends on multiple feeder schools.

– Cities. OK so we’ve got a couple… 6 of them. In the North we’ve got two: Bangor (population 17,575) and St. Asaph (population 3,491). Both of them are 20 minutes away from my base in Llandudno (population 20,710 – almost bigger than both cities put together.) Considering that there are 51 cities in England (average size about 200,000), it should become instantly clear that this is a totally different world! City ministry models in England are not going to help us much here.

– Motorways. So this sounds like a small thing, but in order to get from North Wales to South Wales the quickest, easiest way is to leave the country, travel down the M6 then come back in… Yeah. The lack of mobility infrastructure (& the fact that mid Wales is incredibly sparsely populated) really makes Wales two countries.

 

What We Don’t Need

English City Driven Youth Strategies. Even in the few years I’ve been here I’ve seen several English City youth workers come to the area, try to start a big event only to see it pop and fizzle. Then they move away. I’ve come from 7 years working in London and I’m still saying it! We don’t have feeder schools, we don’t have several key massive youth groups, we don’t have mainstay youth projects and we don’t have the resources available to English cities. We also have a very different geographical town structure than City clusters. Please think contextually. Think about Wales.

Events, projects and physical resources that are crowd-drawing, resource-draining, and lacking follow-up that are created without a proper understanding of the context are not going to make disciples here. They’ll only make even more church debt! It’s just bad stewardship.

 

What We Really DO Need

Methods and praxis for developing mission strategy in schools and a mechanism for rolling that out more widely.

More resources in terms of cash and people to invest incarnationally and intentionally in the area – particularly in para-church projects.

Welsh speakers working alongside veteran youth workers to come up with innovative, fresh and culturally relevant youth work resources and Bible translations.

Churches, cities and towns to pray for us intentionally as a country.

Churches and charities to step up with their resources and take risks by setting up counselling and support networks for emotional and mental health.

To maximize the use of our pre-existing, well established camps and to work them into our church youth strategies.

To keep working in partnership and unity with various other groups and to pool our resources – it’s about the name of Jesus after all!

Writing A Youth Work Strategy From Scratch

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Health Caution: Long and boring. If you’re interested in writing a youth work strategy, don’t know where to start but really don’t want to read though the 2-hour-knocked-out-nonsense below then get in touch at timgoughuk@gmail.com 🙂

Writing youth project strategy can be flippin hard work! I’ve been involved with writing about a dozen now and they’re all remarkably different. I don’t know what the best, most formal or most recognisable way into it is but I’ll have a stab here.

Remember that you as the youth pastor control the flow, but you need input from young people, volunteers, parents, teachers and church leaders to make a strategy viable. Otherwise you’ve got a cool document that hardly anyone will read and even less will follow.

What you’re looking for in a good strategy document is an easy, quotable and motivational top sheet backed up with a larger document that has a smooth flow from data, to values, to the whats and hows and whens. It should always end though, with a sense of openness and accountability.

There tends to be four main stages in putting together a strategy for youth work:

  1. Research & Observation (with Results)
  2. Values, Aims, Mission and Purposes
  3. Implementation and Timelines
  4. Review, Success Measures and Accountability

Each of these four stages needs to be structured enough so to be able to see clearly what’s happening, make changes and celebrate measurable positive change, but also organic and flexible enough to leave room for the motion of the Holy Spirit and the general messiness of people’s lives. And obviously each stage needs a good soaking in and checking against the Bible.

“Writing youth project strategy can be flippin hard work!”

This works like the classic hourglass… at the top you gather as much information as is possible without prejudice, you then zoom in at the middle by finding a simple communicable structure to process that data. Finally you spread out again at the end by implementation in the real world. A good strategy, like a good hourglass, doesn’t exclude or force change upon anything within it – it just slows things down enough to be viewed and processed properly.

Before digging into this any further, we must remember what the sand in inside the hourglass is: it is real people with real lives living in real rebellion or real relationship with God. As much as we sink into the often analytical world of strategy, we must never make the mistake of processing people as simply objects or numbers.

 

  1. Research and Observation (with Results)

This all starts as you’d expect, by gathering data. I will do (and have already done a really basically here) more posts on how to do this. What we’re basically talking about is lots of interviews, group sessions, community survey projects and opinion gathering and observation noting while looking closely and honestly at what resources you have and what might become available. Good stewardship!

A good basic template is SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are what in your internal preexisting project, place or resources are good and need to be kept or bad and need to be rejected/changed. Opportunities and Threats are external – out of your control – things could help or hinder the strengths of weaknesses with some thought or lack of.

It’s important to go broad and deep here, especially talking with lots of different people. This has the very important added benefits of making connections and making sure people feel heard. If they are not at this stage you can guarantee you won’t get them on board later!

“Remember: This is real people with real lives living in real rebellion or real relationship with God.”

It’s important to write up your findings; not in too much indecipherable detail, but in ways that naturally lead you to your values, aims and implementation. It’s far easier to answer the question ‘why didn’t you open a bigger youth group?’ when you’ve got data that says ‘we’ve got no volunteers!’

 

  1. Values, Aims, Mission and Purposes

It’s likely that your data should start to reveal patterns. Maybe you’re in an area with open links with schools and you have able Christian teachers in your church? So developing schools’ mission might be right up your street! Or perhaps you’ve got a youth group that’s already thriving, but growing older and you’ve got no other volunteers stepping up? In which case you’ve probably got a training ground for young leaders and a youth mentoring project.

Values

The big discussion here is what has you data told you that 1. you care about and 2. God is resourcing you for. What keeps coming up, what is available, what are the big needs in your area, what can you uniquely offer? These form your values. Values are what you care about, not what you are going to do about it. Your values are passive ‘we care about this’ or ‘we believe God has called us to that’ statements.

I usually have between 10 – 30 short value statements if that is of any use?

Aims

The next step is your aims. Still staying away from the specifics or implementation you start to group values together somewhat and change them to active language. For instance, if you have these three values:

– ‘We care about the increased homelessness of young people on our streets’
– ‘We’re passionate about young people taking a stand against injustice’
– ‘Our heart breaks for the lack of specific community support for poor young people’

Then bringing them together an aim might be:

– ‘We aim to equip our young people to bring support and care to other young people more needy than themselves’

“You should end up with less aims than values.”

Easy see? You should probably end up with far less aims than values. It’s worth saying that you will feel guilty if certain things don’t come up – don’t! Ephesians 2:10 is very clear that God has prepared good works for each of us to do, without treading on each others toes or suffering burnout. As long as ‘worship Jesus’ and ‘preach the Gospel’ is clearly in there somewhere!

Mission

Your aims should then be simplified and run together into a few short paragraphs, or even just one. This is your mission, what you are striving to thrive at! It’s not forsaking all other tasks, but it is an aim driven, value soaked war-song that comes straight from the information you gathered and meeting head on the needs you discovered. It’s specific, it’s personal and it’s powerful.

Purpose

This is a great midway checkup to see how you’re doing. Purpose is the why to mission’s what. Why is it you believe that you are here to do this? Are you in line with the Bible and with your governing body (church/charity)?

The Rick Warren Purpose Driven stuff says we should derive all we do from 5 areas, namely worship, mission, ministry, prayer and fellowship. It’s a reasonably good check list. Purpose for me is where we have dialogue with the Bible and the governing body that brings explicit language in from both. Write a couple of small paragraphs on this too – or work it into your mission statement.

“Your mission should be specific, personal and powerful.”

  1. Implementation and Timelines

Now for the fun bit! You know your resources and what you do well, you know what to look out for, you’ve got a handle on your values and passions, you know actively what you’re aiming to accomplish, you have a clear mission and purpose – so what are you going to do? Let’s mix the ingredients!

This has always been the easiest, funnest and most creative part. The question is how are you going to do what’s in your mission and aims? What changes are you going to make to your project(s) or what new project(s) are you going to start?

It may be worth looking at a few youth ministry models to get some ideas and see what best fits with where you’re at – and to make sure you’re not falling into any pitfalls like segregating young people away from the rest of the church.

Here’s some good questions to consider when starting new / changing existing projects:

– Are you (or someone you are connecting with) leading young people on a journey that includes ministry, mission, fellowship, prayer and worship?
– Are you developing room for young people to grow as servants and leaders or each other?
– Are you seeking to integrate them into the lives of the church community?
– Are you starting with people or obsessing over places?
– Are you thinking about where young people are or scheming over where you want them to come?
– Are you starting with the faithful core or pandering to the fledgling fringe?

With these in mind, there are no limits to what you could do. I’ve run everything from a quirky sport related alpha courses, to tea drinking clubs, to regular night time walks, to high street youth cafes, to camps, to mentoring programs, to fire building workshops. Go for whatever works with your strategy so far!

Mostly these ideas will come directly from the discussion’s you’ve already had. Try as you might to avoid them, lots of ideas will have already floated around your conversations and obvious things will have surfaced. Other than that I can’t really help you! There are no real rules with this – have fun and come up with something cool.

A good reminder here is that you don’t drop what you’ve learned in the first half of the process. I’ve seen a couple of groups that I’ve walked through these parts come up with ideas completely off kilter from their findings… it was just a pet project they really wanted to do which they tried (and failed) to shoehorn in.

“Set realistic goals that allow you space and time to gather resources.”

Remember when writing up project ideas to be broad enough so there is room for volunteers to adapt and take ownership, but specific enough to show how they flow from your values and aims and how they are meeting needs and maximising on your strengths while stewarding resources.

At this point – if you so wanted – you could write a neat and tidy ‘Vision Casting Statement’ drawn from the needs, values, aims, mission, purpose and implementation parts so far. This is a great thing to go on a top sheet, communicate to a church and bob in a wee little frame for the youth office!

Timelines

It’s important to set realistic goals that allow you space and time to gather resources to start things out and build momentum. If you’re planning on starting a funnel model set of projects for instance, then you’ll need tie to build credibility with the crowds you haven’t met yet and you’ll need time to develop something worthwhile for them to come to.

I usually have a three year strategy that gets tweaked in a big way annually and revisited somewhat every 6 months, so all my implementation is healthily spread out within that kind of time-frame.

Remember to leave room not just for implementation, but also for selling the strategy to trustees, congregations, parents and young people – and also for recruiting and training volunteers, and supervising them properly – and finally for collecting and stewarding resources.

 

  1. Review, Success Measures and Accountability

Review

Many in the United States of America Marine Corps have adopted the motto, ‘Improvise, Adapt and Overcome.’ This is at the heart of review and accountability.

For a strategy to still be successful in ten years time it must adapt constantly to overcome problems and changes that culture and the projects will face. A process for accountability and review needs to be in place.

John Losey, who wrote the immensely helpful ‘Experiential Youth Ministry’ handbooks talks about strategy as a praxis in three parts; theory, action and reflection. Reflection he breaks up further into ‘reflect -> re-view -> inform -> apply. I.e. You reflect on the success of a project, you review it and make changes, you communicate this to others then implement them. Then you do it all over again! He calls it “The Amazing Learning Loop of Depth”, which I always misread as the Amazing Loop of Death, but never-mind.

We need to set a time to go over what we’ve decided strategically and tweak and adapt and improvise. Usually I do this every 6 months, then go over the basics of the research values and aims every year.

Measuring Success

To do this properly, we need to decide how we’re going to measure success. This is always a trixy little topic in youth-work circles as we’ve all heard that ‘its not about numbers’ so much that we’re even getting afraid of doing headcounts – awkward when you start loosing young people on trips to the zoo!

How you measure success will depend on your aims and mission. If it’s your mission to make connections with a school and establish a Christian Union there then success will depend on whether or not you made significant headway with that in the time allotted. If your mission is to see each of your young people bring a friend to Jesus than success will be based on how you’ve taught, supported and worked with them on that… not on their success at doing so. If your mission is to start a crowd event, then keeping a check on numbers (and particularly returning numbers) will be important.

The main thing to say here is do write down specifically what you want to achieve so that you can check it specifically at review time. Even if it is just ‘seeing young people grow deeper as disciples’ – then you will be able to list the fruit and evidence of this happening.

Not being successful is not a problem necessarily, its just motivation to make some changes and keep moving forward. Improvise, adapt and overcome!

Accountability

Final section is to make sure this document is accountable and available. It should at least be available to be read by church members, leaders, parents, team and young people. However, to get other objective thoughts, send it to people you trust outside your circles to get their feedback. Other youth leaders, pastors and friends who might have spotted something from being outside the circles and discussions that you all missed by being immersed in them – wood for trees jumps to mind!

 

Concluding thoughts.

I sat down with a couple of books and a bunch of old notes and started writing about two hours ago. It might be that no-one ever reads this and it might be that plenty more (and more accessible) articles and books do a better job. John Losey jumps to mind again!

Maybe though there is some helpful stuff in here – at least it’s come from practice and I’ve seen it work.

If you go this far… well done! And God bless you loads. Also – if you got this far you’re probably thinking about writing a youth strategy yourself (or you just have nothing better to do… sorry!). If so, get in touch. I’m sure I’ll be more use in person and contextual having a chat than trying to squeeze ten years worth of thoughts into a general 2500 word post! I’m always happy to chat with youthworkers and people passionate about young people! timgoughuk@gmail.com

Better Together: How To Mix Youth Groups

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“No you can’t go to that youth group event because…
– Their theology’s dodgy!
– Their kids will beat you up!
– Their guitarist is rubbish!
– They’re just trying to make money!
– They smell funny!”
AKA – “We think you’ll like it better there and ditch our group for theirs!”

What on Earth is wrong with us and why don’t we encourage our youth groups to mix!?!

Getting youth groups to mix is hard work at the best of times, even without our discouragement and fear. Teenagers themselves can be possessive and territorial about their own spaces and friends. You even see it at large crowd events that draw lots of youth groups together – You get your hand-holding, holy-huddle and clique-gripping as much as anywhere else!

Then you throw the number-obsessed youth leaders into it and you’ve got yourself mini-empires that don’t go anywhere, do anything or meet anybody. Successful discipleship & mission? I think not!

Unity is important. Showing young people they’re not alone is important. Finding ways to recognize Christians in school corridors from other groups is important. Getting these groups together is important.

If we take our heads out of our own… shoes… then we’ll think of the well being of our young people first rather than being driven by fear. Let’s be confident, push out the boat and strive for some unity!

So how do we do it? Here are a few suggestions.

  1. Play nice as youth leaders
    Meet up with other youth leaders! Coffee dates, meals, bowling, training events, networking days, babysitting swaps – I don’t care how you do it but find a way! If the youth leaders accept their responsibility to Gospel partnership by cultivating good relationships then their young people will follow. More than this, it is far easier to work together on joint ideas if there are pre-established relationships.
  2. Safari Youth Group
    Visit other youth groups with your youth group as a whole – and encourage other groups to return the favour. Be good hosts when they come, and please don’t try to ‘outperform’ the other groups. Don’t advertise your own stuff on those nights but share the space and activities. Don’t ‘debrief’ the week after… i.e. don’t shred what you saw in the other group to pieces! Celebrate it and encourage unity.
  3. Coordinate events
    Rather than planning a youth event and inviting other groups to it, start earlier and invite the other groups to be part of the planning process – including date and location. Find where to share responsibility and share credit. Not only will this boost motivation and numbers, but it will spread responsibility and weight, build motivation, open up new avenues of creativity and it will be an epic force of unity.
  4. Community driven events
    When planning together events, rather than going for the classic ‘gig’ approach, do something that encourages mixing… for instance:
    – Local cleanup missions
    – Prayer walks
    – Big meals
    – Camps
    – Game tournaments
  5. Add Competition
    There’s nothing like healthy competition to get youth groups (and youth leaders!) involved. Coming to compete, done properly, always ends with quality mixing and loads of fun with other groups – especially if there’s food involved somewhere! Here’s a few ideas:
    – 5 a side football
    – 4 Square tounaments
    – Bake offs
    – Giant human monopoly
    – Round town scavenger hunts

So there are just a few ways to support unity with other youth clubs. It all starts with our attitudes and letting go of fear! If you’ve got any more ideas please comment and let us know!