Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Christian youth work, perseverance, young people growing
The image has stayed with me for years, around 25 years, just waiting to be used. Tonight is it’s time….
The photo is of friend’s dad who was a forester. Now an old man, he stands in a circle of light, gazing upward at the tall trees he planted many tears ago as saplings. He is surrounded by these huge trees that are many times his height, so wide that he could not wrap his arms around them. In his gaze can be seen memories of long hours of hard work, yet mostly what one senses in the photo is satisfaction at a job well done, but more than that. It is pride, that these wonderful trees are reaching full maturity and that he has played his small part.
This came to my mind this week after I spent some time with Amanda, Gemma, Nicola and David. These are some of the young people I worked with over the years in Gilmerton and we met up on Monday. For a few hours we told stories, caught up on news, played sport and ate food (well, pot noodle – if you can call that food!). As the time passed I felt like that old forester, seeing the trees grow up around him and rejoicing in the growth.
When I first met them they were part of the groups coming along to our clubs, just faces in the crowd. Very quickly though they became real people as we worked with them, visited their homes, went on weekends away, served their high school. We prayed for them, loved them and nurtured them in the name of Jesus and …they have grown.
Amanda is now planning to go on a gap year with Youth for Christ and was wrestling with the practical implications, as well as trying to see what God was doing in her life. Gemma talked about a summer trip to Romania where her faith was challenged and humbled by working with children who have complicated lives and needs. Nicola is also thinking about a gap year with Christians in Sport but wondering how this fits in with her parents’ thoughts. Meanwhile David was talking about another year, missing the old days of Cross Sports on Friday nights and wondering about his future – oh, yes, and trying not to swear too much (quite unsuccessfully!). They are growing.
All too quickly the hours passed and it was soon time for me to head back to Dunoon. As I left I felt a mixture of emotions…
sadness at leaving these amazing young people
gratitude at sharing their lives over the last few years
hope that they would continue to find God and that God would continue to find them
determination that I will do all I can to help and support them, in their God-life but also in any way I can
When I came back to Dunoon I looked at the young people here in a new way. I don’t really know many of them yet so they are still mainly faces, and a few names, in the crowd. Yet thinking of young people I have worked with over the years I saw the potential of the Dunoon youngsters. The potential to become like the tall and maturing trees I see Amanda, Gemma, Nicola and David as being.
Youth work is a long game, like a forester planting trees. My hope for you tonight is that you see mighty trees where once you saw only saplings or seeds.
God bless,
Paul
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: edge, God, liminality, Scotland, youth work
What does ‘the edge’ suggest to you?
Is it a place of exposure and isolation?
Or is it a place of potential and adventure?
When I came to Argyll I wanted to call my blog ‘Tales from the Edge’. However, I didn’t want anyone in Argyll to read that title and think I was being cheeky. You know the idea, I came from Edinburgh previously, and many people see this as an important city, so coming to Argyll must somehow be a comedown. That’s not how I see my move here. Wherever there are people there is a centre for each person is of equal value, each person is valued by God, each person is present to God.
Yet I am still drawn to the idea of ‘the edge’.
On Monday I was driving in beautiful autumn sunshine, crisp and bright, along some of the most isolated roads in Scotland. Occasionally I passed a small village, saw a few houses. This is the edge of our country.
The churches are mainly small, working with small numbers, taking small steps, starting new programmes, praying new prayers. This is the edge of our church.
As I drove and thought, my wandering mind returned again to the concept of ‘liminality’ (described in Jamieson’s ‘Churchless Faith’). This refers to the edge as threshold, the edge of new potential rather than the edge that is far from the centre, unimportant and peripheral. This ‘edge’ for me is like….
sitting on the edge of the sea and being drawn into imagining a wider world
standing in a huge crowd as your favourite band is about to walk onto the stage, the music rising and the expectation immense
suddenly realising that the hand you hold and the lips you kiss belong to the person you are utterly committed to and want to love forever
For many Christian youth workers, we feel on the edge. Our commitment to following the way of Jesus, to being with young people takes us to that place. Sadly for many of us this does mean isolation and exposure, feeling far from support and kindness as we wrestle with the fluctuating friendships and loyalties of young people and the inconsistencies of the Christian Church. But this is our chosen way and we must support each other, to allow us to move on from ‘the threshold of the future’ (Mike Riddell’s phrase) into God’s future for all of us.
So I leave you with a question (well, maybe it’s two!). Who do you know is on the edge and what are you doing to help them?
Entering a Dunoon café on Tuesday morning, I stood by the counter chatting with the man ahead of me. He was a walker and was relating how he had been wandering around the local hills, taking a few wrong turns but enjoying the wild and wet hills. Saying goodbye to him I took my cuppa to a comfy chair and settled into a quiet, still place for my Bible meditation.
The passage was Mark 9: 38 – 41. As time passed, my writing wandered around issues such as,
Why was the other man not included with Jesus’ followers?
How frustrated was Jesus with his disciples’ ‘blindness’, their desire to control and limit God’s love?
How important was this event in John’s development as the disciple of love, who wrote later of the intertwining flowing love from God the Father through the Son and Spirit and on through humanity? How important was it in changing his proud heart at limiting the range of God’s compassionate action?
As God engaged me through these thoughts I returned to a familiar theme of finding God on the edges. This has been a lifetime call God has drawn me on and I often find myself wrestling with how I am sustained, and how to sustain others at the edge.
So I ended with the words of Jesus, ‘anyone by just giving you a cup of water in my name is on our side. Count on it that God will notice (Mark 9: 41). Here I decided I would keep looking for surprising allies, surprising sources of goodness for God to nurture me and shield me.
With this gossamer-thin hope in me I tidied up my Bible, pen and paper, preparing to pay for my cuppa at the counter. When asking to pay the girl looked at me oddly, and as I repeated that I wanted to pay she said,
‘That man you were talking to earlier paid for your tea!’.
Smiling to myself, I left, wondering just what God was doing. Was this a small and insignificant co-incidence? Or was God showing that he would nurture me, if I kept committing myself to the edge?
I offer you these words, with my hope that God will find you this week.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Over his shoulder I saw Christ,
Pinned on a cross
Eyes cast down in …pain, acceptance, anguish,
Private agonies made all-too public
Over his shoulder I saw Christ,
The cross- contorted controversy
At the heart of my hope
Today was my service of introduction to my post here in Argyll. It was a small but significant service, marking the presbytery’s radical step in appointing me their post of youth and children’s advisor. I was quietly God-inspired by the words of the prayers and the sermon, by some of the songs – and by the stained glass windows.
As I stood at the front of Kirn church I faced the moderator of presbytery as he read ‘the charges’ to me. He faced the congregation and behind him were several of the beautiful stained glass windows in the church. So, as he spoke to me,
Over his shoulder I saw Christ.
This is one challenge facing me, to find and see Christ within the institution of the church amidst the formal religion. Like many Christians I have an ambivalent relationship with the church, at the same time nourishing but also draining, inspiring but frustrating.
Tonight I just remember that
Over his shoulder I saw Christ.
And I hope for the future….
Close But Not Connecting
Recently I attended a presbytery meeting on Bute. It was my first presbytery meeting in Argyll and it was fine, another step forward in my learning and serving here. What caught my attention was the lunch – no, not for the obvious reason although it was very tasty! What I liked was that it was prepared, cooked and served by pupils from the local high school, Rothesay Academy.
The church building and the newly built school campus are close by and this was a wonderful example of how a church and school can work together. The school benefited by part of it’s HE curriculum and community partnership work being delivered. The church benefited by having a tasty lunch and by meeting the wonderful staff and pupils of the school. Everybody wins.
On a parallel track, my weekly meditation this week is on Mark 9: 30 – 32. In one of his typically brief passages Mark draws a picture that has intrigued me. Here is the Son of God himself, cutting away from the crowds to give some focussed teaching time to the disciples. We’ve all been there as youth workers; the moment when we plan a programme to go deep with the young people, to really explore who Jesus is and what the way of Jesus is all about – especially the hard bits. We work to go to a place where there are no distractions, we organise the material, we make the space in busy diaries. We build the relationships of trust and interest.
Let’s remind ourselves what happened….
Jesus didn’t want anyone to know their whereabouts, for he wanted to teach his disciples. He told them,
‘The Son of Man is about to be betrayed to some people who want nothing to do with God. They will murder him. Three days after his murder, he will rise, alive’.
They didn’t know what he was talking about, but were afraid to ask him about it.
The disciples didn’t get it, didn’t get what Jesus was on about. Even worse, they were afraid to ask Jesus.
So many question come to me….
How did the disciples feel when Jesus took them off by themselves?
Why were the disciples afraid?
How did Jesus feel, at the distance growing between him and his closest friends?
How did Jesus feel, speaking of his death and life, but not being understood?
I see the disciples and Jesus as close but not connecting, unlike the church and the school at the start of this blog.
Spiritual wonderings…
I am drawn to wonder what Jesus would like me to ask him.
I ponder why I might be afraid of a deep connection with Jesus.
I grieve and rage that so much of our church life is close to God but does not connect with God.
Strategic wonderings
I am encouraged to find again ways for church and school to join together.
Programme wonderings…
I commit once more to finding ways to keep going deep with young people without being crippled by disappointment
May you be close and connect, with young people and with God.
Keep in touch!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: beginning, questioning, struggle, youth worker
Tonight I am thinking of three people.
A 5th year pupil finds me in my new high school office. His name is Michael and he asks me, ‘Should terrorists be released from prison?’ The Lockerbie situation is reaching it’s controversial climax and this is no mere academic question. Yes, it started in an RE class but this young man is genuinely questioning his values and the values of the world, as most young people do if not all with his eloquence or intensity.
A colleague starting off his youth work career is faced with questions about managing staff and his own theology, his own identity in God. He is suddenly aware of the importance of his work, how what he says and does will affect real people now and for the future.
Another colleague, this one having served God, young people and the church faithfully for many years is suddenly faced with personal insult and criticism from his current employers and is crippled by doubt about his future as a Christian youth worker. He is broken and bruised and his family and friends hurt for him, unsure of how best to guide this good man.
This journey we embark on as youth workers faithful to Jesus is not an easy one.
I don’t have any easy answers tonight. All I can bring is my own wrestling with God through the Scripture given by the lectionary this week.
Psalm 84 in The Message translation is a wonderful piece of writing. The core for me is not the passages about the house of God or the Temple, despite their sincerity and the wonderful songs they have inspired. No, for me it is these lines that echo in my spiritual life; verses 5 – 7
And how blessed all those in whom you (God) live,
Whose lives become roads you travel;
They wind through lonesome valleys, come upon brooks,
Discover cool springs and pools brimming with rain!
God travelled,
these roads curve up the mountain, and
At the last turn – Zion!
God in full view
They speak of lonely journeys and occasional refreshment on a long tiring road. Even the ultimate destination, God himself, is only reached ‘at the last turn’. No easy path. Yet what an amazing image, that it is our faithful lives that become the roads God travels. What an encouragement to those of us who are struggling, whose load is heavy or for whom the road is too long, too tiring, too lonely.
The gospel reading for this week has been John 6: 56 – 69. In John’s unique style Jesus’ words are interflowing and swirling, as water in a raging river with concepts of God and love and Father and Son and humans all woven together. This is mystery. This is scandal. And like all mysteries and scandals people are attracted but most then leave, unable to understand, accept or believe – which brings us to this poignant passage; verses 67 – 69 (this time in the New Revised Standard Version)
‘So Jesus asked the Twelve,
‘Do you also wish to go away?’
Simon Peter answered him,
‘Lord to whom would we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to know and believe
that you are the Holy One of God’
Behind Peter’s inspired and inspiring declaration I sense a journey, similar to Psalm 84. He says that ‘we have come to know’ not ‘we know’. How many conversations, struggles and arguments, long silences and deep prayers lay behind this certainty? It is in these spaces in Scripture that my own faith in God finds a home. Not in the towering speeches of Jesus (although they inspire me) or the miraculous actions of Jesus (although they humble me) but in the growing moments that he seeded in his followers. In these reflective moments, in these still moments a living faith in the living God was born and nurtured and nourished.
And I keep thinking of my colleagues tonight, the enthusiastic beginner and the bruised veteran. And I think of all the youth workers, volunteer or paid, that seek to be and share God’s good news to young people like Michael. I have no answers, only these words carved from my own wrestling with God and the world.
So tonight I ask you to do two things.
Firstly, care for your youth workers that they may care for all God’s children and secondly, find ways that nurture your own faith on the long road to God.
I don’t know her name….
She wore mainly black clothes, a woolly hat with long hanging cords and little pointed ears on top. Her t-shirt was pink with a skull and crossbones printed on the front, her bag woven and a bit weird looking. She would not be out of place sitting in Hunters Square in Edinburgh or outside the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow yet I saw her yesterday in Bowmore, on the island of Islay.
I don’t know her name….
Yet I know that, like any teenager anywhere, she will be wrestling with questions of life, wondering about relationships, thinking about who she is. She will get excited about discovering new bands and will probably have argued with her parents at least once since I saw her yesterday. She may even have made some God-connections in that time too.
I don’t know her name….
Yet I trust that God does.
And I hope that the church will.
And I commit myself to making the connections between young people like her, the living God and the folk in our churches.
Filed under: Uncategorized
All these connections – old roads, new roads and several ferries. In the first month of this job I have travelled to some wonderful places; I have walked old roads overgrown with weeds and wandered along hill tracks, I have driven new roads filled with all the traffic of summer, I have been on 5 minute ferry jouneys and 4 hour ferries.
Now I am on Tiree, almost leaving the manse to go and preach before I get back on the ferry to Oban. As I look out the window I see an old grass track through the field, then the single track road with a handful of cars passing. Behind that on the hill I can see part of an old airbase and on the far horizon a mysterious radar tracking station.
All those connections, some disused, others new, some physical others invisible. So many of the churches I have met over these weeks have issues about connections, how to connect with young people and children. Some are doing OK while others have larger issues to deal with. Like the roads and tracks though some churches will rediscover old ways, some will find new ways but I am certain there will not just be one way to re-connect our churches with our young people and children.
Treasure your connections with children, value those relationships and if you do not have them I hope you can be helped to make them.
Time to check over my notes, pray for God’s blessing and head off.
For the first time in over 20 years I am not working with young people this summer. No missions, no camps, no weekends away, no summer festivals….no young people.
It’s an odd experience and I feel unsettled, disjointed, not-quite-right. I miss their excitement and laughter, their joy and bizarre clothes and hair styles, their questions and their faith in God.
Yet I am also enjoying the freedom and liberation, the absence of organising and chasing people to get programmes ready. I sense the blessing of God in the stillness, the epace of God even as I wrestle with what comes next for me, what forms of youth work I wil take up in this next chapter of my life.
If you are reading this and are involved with young people this summer may it be a wild time of God-filled adventures for you and them.
I look forward to joining in again soon!
Filed under: Uncategorized
Reflections on Mark 5: 21 – 43
keep close,
keep close to the one who heals,
who challenges and changes
the world around him,
keep close to the one who suprises
those who follow him by what he doesn’t do
and upsets
them with what he does do.
For he senses the deep rooted seeking of the hurt,
he touches the hardest grief and creates the deepest joy.
In a jostling , anonymous crowd he creates stillness and connection,
a God who touches, holds back, responds, perseveres
a God who loves.
So, to how find that God?
How to let that God find me
Well, I can go to the same places and hope to meet Him there –
in jostling crowds and in hidden away pain.
I can look at Jesus, be inspired and
bring out my hidden pain and hurts,
bring out them to you, living God,
and hope for healing…
