St Mark's Church, Leamington Spa, UK

Magazine for February 2011

Gemma’s Blog

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Luke 4:18-19

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it sure is hard to ‘proclaim good news’.  Often people have closed their hearts to the good news of Christ, or have fallen out with God and blame him for bad things in their life.  Sometimes people have no experience of God at all and perceive him to be irrelevant, outdated, or somehow boring.   People with all these opinions and more surround us in our culture today.

In the last seven years as a youth worker I have met an overwhelming variety of young people from every walk of life you can imagine, from every kind of situation and with every kind of attitude towards God.  Perhaps some of the most interesting, challenging and life changing conversations that I’ve had haven’t been in churches, they haven’t been at Christian events, but out in the cold, on the park, on a Friday night.

And that’s why, we’ve decided to roll out a detached youth work programme based at St Mark’s, from April 2011.  If you already know all about detached, then you can stop reading here… but for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about read on.

Detached youth work happens on the streets.  In happens in the places where young people hang out at night, the places where people complain that young people are ‘causing trouble’, the places the police record as ‘Anti Social Behaviour Hot Spots’.  The places where young people are.

Our agenda is not to bring them into church, not to preach the gospel to them from a Bible in hand, but to show them the love of the gospel by being there with them.  Showing through our actions that someone accepts them, someone appreciates them, someone values who they are and what they can be.  Someone is interested in their views, someone is passionate about listening to their stories and someone is ready and willing to answer their questions.

At the core of a detached youth work theology is the principal of ‘going where they are’.  Almost all of the young people I’ve met on detached wouldn’t attend church services and nor would they attend youth clubs or events specifically organized for their age group.

Jon Robinson and Jan Greenhough in their book ‘Street Smart’ (2011) , put it as follows:

“Again, they had some fixed ideas about the kind of environment that was on offer: ‘Too much like school’, ‘They wouldn’t approve of us’, They don’t smoke or drink anything’.  They felt that the leaders would disapprove of their lifestyles, dress, language and behaviour and they didn’t want to go to a place where some authority figure would be telling them what to do.

“They may or may not be right about that – but it’s important that we know what our image is in the minds of the youngsters we’re going to meet.  This is why, whatever we’re trying to organise, we have to go where the young people are…”

And so, we are people who are anointed by God, sent to proclaim his unconditional love to those out there, who are poor, who are oppressed, who are unwelcome, who are victims of prejudice, who are anti-social and who, (on at least some nights of the week!), are genuinely looking for someone who actually cares.

To find out more about our detached programme, or to sign up to be on a team, please get in touch, or come to one of our events (details below).

Gemma