Youth Club to Church – A Journey?
About 4 months ago after much debate as a church we started an open youth club on a Tuesday night. It started with 6 young people and over the past 4 months has grown to an average of about 20 a week…it’s nothing revolutionary…it’s a simple youth club: somewhere to hang out, tuck shop, pool table, table tennis, table football and a Wii but it’s brilliant!
Ethos
The ethos behind the youth club was always to be something run by us as a church and therefore with Christian leaders with the aim of not babysitting but building relationships with the young people we get along. My link in school meant that a lot of the young people recognised me anyway and add into this Christian assemblies which I do and all the young people know I’m a Christian and even ask me why I had an egg smashed on my head (an Easter assembly on sacrifice!).
Bridging the Gap
Of course ultimately it would be fantastic if each of these young people ended up with a relationship with Christ however there is no faith-based input within the youth club other than the occasional conversation based on things that have been left in the hall from church or something I’ve done or said in assembly at school it seems unlikely.
The jump between our unstructured youth club and our faith based groups is huge and so the question that I remain with is:
How will these young people make the jump between coming to a church-run youth club and a relationship with God?
I don’t really have the answers but I do know there are some fantastic inbetween events which I’m hoping to encourage young people along to…by this I mean events which have some Christian input but are perhaps filled with live music or an event at a theme park (such as Alton Tower’s ‘Big Event’ or the Diocese of York and Lightwater Valley’s ‘XLS’). These events seem to provide an opportunity for young people to have a taste of spirituality at the same time as being somewhere exciting and maybe they’re where it’s at (whatever ‘it’ is!).
I guess biblically Jesus didn’t do that much converting just conversing!
Out of the ten guys who Jesus casts demons out of only 1 comes back to say thank you and even then we’re not told that this man gave up his life to Christ and repented of his sins…the woman caught in adultery doesn’t become born-again but is simply told by Jesus to ‘go and sin no-more’.
I wonder if rather than aiming for conversions we should be aiming to build relationships, to show Christ in our own lives, to show love, compassion and care to these young people, to engage them in conversation about faith and to see where their journey leads…I have no doubt from my work in a chaplaincy project in school that young people want to know more about faith and that they’re asking the questions…it’s just a case of whether their asking has to lead to us praying ‘the prayer’ or not?
At a PCC I spoke at for one of the supporting churches of Hunsley Christian Youth Trust I was asked how many people we’d had ‘coming to the LORD’ as a result of the work and the honest answer is none but young people are engaging with questions about faith and hopefully that will ultimately lead somewhere.
I guess the general conclusion might be conversation not conversion!
Anyway those are just some thoughts…comments?
Originally born in East Sussex Mark is a 25 year old youth and schools worker based in East Yorkshire just outside of Hull.
