Youth Ministry

By some accounts this is a difficult time to be young in London. We are accustomed to media stories of young people as stressed by the expectations of the education system and pressured as customers of the consumer society. We are equally familiar with pictures of young people as a danger to one another and society at large through knife and gun crime, anti-social behaviour and political radicalisation. Cultural commentators lament the loss of the ‘latency’ of childhood, the time and space to grow and to cross thresholds of development and maturity. Young people are cynical, fearful and weary of a world of exploitation, broken homes, concrete and greyness.

There are, however, other accounts which provide a balancing picture. Our diocesan contact with 50,000 young people in our Church Schools, for example, suggests that, for many, life in London is stimulating and enjoyable; that school and college provide creative challenges and that the young are taking up the further social and cultural challenges of the ‘world city’, often with remarkable courage and imagination.

London Challenge 2012 begins with a ‘vision statement’, that of the New Jerusalem (Rev 21). Our challenge is to present London with a new vision of itself, informed by the Christian Faith. London is “a world city that struggles to comprehend where its own well-being might lie”. Part of that struggle is to understand how better to nurture and encourage the young. Alongside the struggle of our city in this respect we have to lay our own attempts to understand the ways in which we have a vision that is relevant to the well-being of young people, in all their diversity, in London.

We have to challenge ourselves to understand the vision of the young that the tradition of our faith hands on to us. Jesus places children at the centre of those who are following him. He declares, without qualification or condition, that the Kingdom of God belongs to “such as these” (Mtt 18:1-5, Lk 18:15-17). What would a church look like that was to take this declaration seriously? How prepared is the Church to model a society within which Christ’s vision of the Kingdom of God is reflected; where children and young people are prioritised and have full possession? How prepared is the Church to model the values and relationships of the Kingdom to come, where children and young people are empowered to express themselves as full members?

London Challenge 2012 expresses a commitment to a strategy for youth “with a particular concern for the training of young people in Christian leadership”. To this end the Diocese of London has enjoyed a fruitful three-year partnership with the Children’s Society through the Youth Development Project. This strategy is a direct reflection of the experiences of many of our parish churches through this Project and a distillation of the things the churches of the diocese have asked for through a series of consultations.