Street Smart

Practical skills for connecting with young people

John Robinson, Jan Greenough

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780857210715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Why is there such a distance between the churches and the young people living around them? How can Christians engage with young people? How can they build relationships? How can they plan and develop their youth ministry? What practical skills do they need? For years John worked on Manchester's broken down estates, frequently dealing with aggressive, often drugged or drunk teenagers, and has learned the hard way how to diffuse tension, establish contact quickly, maintain boundaries, and also how to develop relationships over time and establish mutual respect.

What is your passion as a Christian? I realized many years ago that my deepest desire was to communicate the love of God to young people, and as I became involved in youth work I realized that God had given me the gifts to do it.

I’ve been involved with youth and community work for a long time – since 1993, when I married and moved to Southampton where my wife, Gillian, worked. Along the way I’ve met a lot of people, gained a lot of experience, and most importantly, trained and qualified as a Youth and Community Worker. I’ve run outreach projects from a cheap, converted camper van in Southampton and from The Message’s state-of-the-art, well-equipped buses in Manchester; I’ve worked in challenging inner-city communities and scattered rural ones; I’ve taught in youth clubs, schools, colleges and prisons; and I’ve travelled the world and seen similar work going on in America, Australia, Malaysia and Thailand. So the advice and suggestions I’ll be making in these pages come from three sources: my professional training, years of practical experience, and a heart that wants to reach out to young people and show them how to meet Jesus.

I’ve also visited a lot of churches where people are burning with enthusiasm to go out and contact young people and take the message of God’s love to them. I’ve given talks and presentations, and over and over again people have said, “Please give us some guidance about how to get started, how to get a youth work project off the ground.”

My advice, first of all, is to get the basics right. However keen you are to get out there and start meeting people, you will store up trouble for yourselves if you rush at it. The groundwork may not sound exciting – and you may cringe at the thought of committees and management and rotas and training – but unless you are prepared to put in the time to get these things set up, you will find either that your project fizzles out through lack of support, or that your surrounding communities (and the local agencies which operate in them) are unwilling to engage with you.

Lots of people – faithful, enthusiastic Christians who trust wholeheartedly in the Lord – find this stage frustrating. “Just pray,” they say, “and have faith. If God is in the project, he’ll lead it where he wants it to go.” That’s fine, as far as it goes. I always pray for a project – it’s the foundation of all I do. But what if I do nothing but pray? Who will organize the training, or make sure there’s petrol in the bus, or get a million other jobs done? Yes, we’ll trust in God – but he’s relying on us to do our part, in the best way we can. And that means thinking things through before we get started.

I have known churches which started doing some youth work simply because they found they had money available, and it seemed a good use of their resources. Sometimes it’s all worked out well – but sometimes the whole project has fallen apart because it was started with no real plan in place. So let’s look at how to plan well. Faith is certainly essential to all we do, and it’s important in youth outreach work: we have faith that God will lead us to the right people, and that he will change lives. But having faith is not an excuse not to do things properly!

What is your vision?

Why are you taking the gospel onto the street? I know that when I first got involved with youth work, I was driven by the desire to reach young people with the message of salvation which transformed my own life.

I have written elsewhere (in Nobody’s Child) about my childhood, spent in foster care and children’s homes. In spite of repeated efforts to sort my life out, I ended up homeless and living on the streets. I felt completely worthless, and it wasn’t until I encountered Jesus – in the shape of some wonderful Christians who welcomed me and put their arms around me, dirty and smelly as I was – that I began to believe that I could be of value to anyone.

I want to share that experience with others. I want to take the wonderful message of God’s love to people who have missed out on love and friendship and caring, and tell them that they matter. Unfortunately, church isn’t always the best place to do it. I’ve found that the best place to meet young people is on their own territory – in the street or at school – where they’re relaxed and more willing to listen to what we have to say.

However, it’s not enough to say, “We want to reach young people with the message of God’s love.” That may be your ultimate vision, but how are you going to achieve it? For that, you need much more detailed aims and objectives.

Do you want to do something on a small scale – maybe a tea, coffee or soup run, that will enable you to meet people on the street? That’s fine. Lots of organizations do a fantastic job doing just that. It’s a real service and it opens up the possibility of all sorts of interesting conversations. There’s absolutely no problem if that’s your vision.

What if you want to develop this work further – do you have more long-term aims? Would you eventually like to have a building where you can operate a youth club of some kind? Most churches have premises of one sort or another that they may want to use if the young people they contact are willing to go there. What sort of work do you want to develop? A café where food is served and with speakers coming in? A coffee bar with games? With computer training? With an advisory service? (Health, relationships or employment advice are always popular, as are drug and alcohol information, but you need some professional input.) Perhaps your ultimate aim is to run a non-alcoholic bar where young people can meet their friends. Or a bus ministry like the one we ran at The Message where we had double-decker buses kitted out as mobile youth centres, with drinks machines, DVDs and plasma screens, games consoles and sound systems. You may want to specialize in outreach through sports, running a football, rugby or basketball club.

It’s worth talking to other local churches and youth workers, so that you know what else is currently available (there’s no point in setting up in accidental competition with a similar scheme in the next street – there’s plenty for us to do for God without repeating what others are doing!) and also what has been tried (and maybe failed) in the past. You need to know your patch, and its history. What are the needs in the area that aren’t being met by existing work? Don’t be put off, however, if God has given you a clear vision for something that has been tried before without success: perhaps it wasn’t right for the area twenty years ago, but maybe now is the right time.

Whatever your aims, you need to explore all the possibilities and work out what is feasible with the expertise and funding you have available or are likely to be able to get. You may have to start small, but have a plan for your long-term goals. There’s no harm in dreaming – and God can move mountains!

Start by thinking whom you want to target – Teens? Pre-teens? Families? Then look at as many possible scenarios as you can think of. What does God want you to do? Go to him in prayer.

Setting up a constitution

From prayer to paperwork may seem like a big step. And a constitution sounds like a bureaucratic step too far, doesn’t it? But actually, it’s a really useful tool.

A constitution is the governing document for your organization. It defines your purpose and states clearly what your objectives are, how you plan to operate and how you are organized. Going through the process of writing all this down can be really helpful. It makes you get all your ideas down on paper in a sensible form so that everyone involved can see what you’re aiming to achieve. When people see that, they can buy into it prayerfully, and give you their support because they know where you’re going.

It’s also a safety device: it means that the project can’t get diverted from your original purpose, and it can be used to settle any disputes that might arise. It also makes people accountable to the original vision, and ensures that financial procedures are laid down so that funding is properly administered.

Having a proper constitution adds to your credibility: it indicates to other people that you’re well organized and serious about what you’re doing. It also enables other organizations to judge whether you meet their criteria for co-operative work or even funding.

Once you know your aims and objectives, you can decide on a name for your project. The name is important. For a start, you don’t want to duplicate something else that’s already established in your area. It causes confusion, and if any untoward incidents occur at the other project, then you could be affected. Be circumspect about your name – check it out on Google and with plenty of other people before you decide on it. It’s possible to accidentally choose something that has unfortunate connotations or particular local meanings you may not be aware of.

In general, your constitution should include the following information:

• the name of the project
• where it is based
• what its purpose is
• the names of the officials: a chairperson, a treasurer, a secretary to take notes at meetings, a main project leader, and many other necessary roles
• the duties and powers of the officials (e.g. you may have two people with the authority to sign cheques)
• the names of the supporters
• the frequency of meetings (for organizers as well as “events”)
• the budget, and the names of the accountant and the auditor
• the policies you have in place.

I’d like to emphasize again that this is really necessary. I often come across people who say that they don’t want to bother with this sort of thing – they want to step out in faith and prayer. If you are doing a one-off project for an afternoon with a group of friends from church, that’s fine. It’s limited and you can make up the rules as you go along – but even then, if something goes wrong, you’re accountable. For a larger-scale project which will run for months or years, it’s not enough. It’s up to us to do the very best we can for God, and that means taking our job seriously.

We may not be “of” this world, but we certainly live “in” it, and we live in a country where there are rules and regulations. We have to work within the confines of the law, and that includes health and safety, risk assessments, child protection and all the rest of it. We have to have policies for all these things. If we are hoping to work with others in our local community, we need to show them that we have all the safeguards in place that they would expect to find in any well-run, official organization. If you are going to do youth work, you need trained and experienced youth workers as well as volunteers. Being a church and using volunteers is not an excuse for failing to do things properly. If you don’t have trained youth workers in your church, seek advice. Many denominations have a youth officer with experience of setting up projects.

I’ve often worked in teams where we expect to spend months and months praying over the aims and objectives for a project, and getting the fine-tuning right so that we know we can proceed safely. For major projects we get lawyers and the police to look at our constitution to make sure we’ve got it right. It doesn’t mean compromising our Christian principles: insisting on running a project that’s safe is a godly principle.

For British readers, further information and sample constitutions can be obtained from the Charity Commission (Charity Commission Direct, PO Box 1227, Liverpool L69 3UG; www.charitycommission.gov.uk). Readers overseas should seek out the local regulations governing charities.

From “bitty” to businesslike

When I set up the Streetwise project in Southampton, I had a vision: to reach the young people in the area. I got some funding from the bishop, and I bought and fitted out an old camper van. There was a lot of interest in the project – who was this strange Yorkshireman driving round the estates? Would this project achieve anything? Would it last?

I could see that I needed support: a treasurer to oversee the handling of money, and a committee with its own chairman to whom I and my work would be accountable. Until then the project was operating but it was “bitty” – I had general support but nothing specific; I had some finance, but it wasn’t clearly allocated; the work was going on but it was scrappy, there was no plan and no format.

I found a team of people to help me: some of them were the parents of teenagers, the church treasurer was a businessman and accountant who gave us his time for free, and I got some secular youth workers on board to give us advice.

We met weekly until we had formatted a constitution; we sent out newsletters to our supporters so they knew what we were doing; we contacted the local council and the Charity Commissioners; we organized signatories for cheques so all our handling of money was recorded and transparent. The work took off and gained respect from local organizations and the churches who supported us.

Outside organizations

If you’re setting out to make a real difference in your local community, all these fundamental issues are vitally important. You won’t be working in isolation, as one church or a little group of Christians alone in the world. As soon as you start making contact with young people you’ll find yourselves interacting with everyone else – their schools, their families, the local council, the police, social services and even Youth Offending Teams. There may be local authority youth workers who are willing to get involved with your project, and you need to be able to show them that you are businesslike in what you do. Don’t compromise over the fact of your faith, but don’t be too proud to work with others and seek their advice.

If you know your area, understand the social issues there, and have the history of past initiatives at your fingertips – the names of the organizations involved, the statistics of their success or failure – people will be more likely to take you seriously. What these organizations see when you’re out on the street, working among young people, makes a big difference. So often we’ve been referred to dismissively as “The God Squad”, only to have people change their tune when they realize that we’re properly organized, with professionally trained staff, Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks and everything else.

People want to know that your activities are not just for show, or done for the sake of ticking the “youth work” box on your church agenda. They want to know that your project is going to have long-term benefits for the community. That’s when you start getting other organizations on board. At The Message we received funding from the local police authority, authorized because they had discovered that when one of our buses spent the evening on certain estates, the incidence of petty crime dropped dramatically – all the trouble-makers were being entertained on the bus. They didn’t mind giving financial support to a Christian organization, with overtly stated Christian aims and objectives. What mattered to them was that we were making a real difference to the job they were trying to do.

Christians in a secular world

We often make the assumption that our agendas are radically different from those of other organizations – and that people are so suspicious of “religion” that they will avoid supporting a project which says openly that its aim is to spread the good news of Jesus Christ. This isn’t necessarily true. My experience has been that people will listen to you – whether or not you’re a Christian organization – provided you can show that you know what you’re about, and you’re not engaged in just a bit of aimless do-gooding. Other agencies, such as the local authority or the police, will be looking for a business plan, clear aims and objectives, a committee with a chairman and a treasurer, a regular training programme and proper provision for health and safety, child protection and so on. If those things are in place, they can see that you are approaching your project professionally, and they’re much more likely to be prepared to work alongside you and support you. The work of Christian organizations is often highly respected: Christian volunteers have the motivation and commitment to make a real difference.

You should always be honest about your objectives. You may be helping young people to get into education, or housing, or employment; but if your ultimate objective is to get them involved in the local church, you should say so. In fact, if you’re running the project from your local church, they’ll expect it – and if you don’t say so, they’ll suspect that you aren’t being open about your motivation.

I often used to attend meetings of the local council, and I’d hear people say, “Oh, yes, John’s one of those Christians.” But when they realized that I was also a trained youth worker, that I wasn’t going to be a Bible-basher, but that I wasn’t going to compromise my beliefs either, they were relaxed about having me there. Most people don’t have a problem with that: they wouldn’t ostracize someone because of their religion. I wasn’t ashamed of my faith, just matter-of-fact and open about it, and I think they preferred that to someone who was wishy-washy about their beliefs.

Suppose you are trying to hire a hall. If word gets about that the event is run by the “God Squad”, people may be unwilling to let it to you (and even more unwilling to attend!). But if you can say that it’s a youth initiative run by a Christian organization, with full professional expertise available, and with the full support of the police and/or the local council, it’s a different matter. You aren’t compromising your faith, but you are at the same time providing reassurance for the owners. On the other hand, if you merely say that it’s an event for young people, and they subsequently find out that you omitted to mention that you’re a Christian organization, they will feel deceived.

You don’t have to conceal your Christian faith and principles to set up a project that has massive benefits for the community, and gets funding and support from the secular organizations. But yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. First Things First
• 2. Go Where They Are
• 3. Back to School
• 4. Making Connections
• 5. Outreach Strategy
• 6. Working Together
• 7. Being Professional
• 8. Handling Aggression
• 9. Don’t Switch Off!
• Appendix 1: A Policeman’s View
• Appendix 2: Risk Assessment