This is how the most effective youth club I’ve run works.
On a Monday after I leave the office at the All Souls Clubhouse and head home via a supermarket. Arrive at home, and sort out dinner for around eight people. Have a cup of tea. Tidy the flat a bit.
Spend some time praying and finishing any preparations for later on.
At 6pm various teenage guys turn and we spend an hour chatting and eating food. We chat about the week gone. Sometime we play cards.
At 7pm we get Bibles out and spend an hour working through a passage of scripture. This term we’re working through Genesis 1-11 and we’re currently wrestling through the story of Noah. Last year we spent the entire time going through John’s Gospel.
At 8pm after a short time of prayer, everyone goes home. That’s it. One hour of eating food and chatting and whatever, and one hour of studying the Bible together. At the same time across the parish there’s a parallel girls’ group running as well.
The Bible studies look a bit like this.
Read a reasonable chunk of Scripture (generally around a chapter or two), ask the young people what questions they have about it, and ask the young people some questions about the passage.
Between myself, the other leader and the young people we’ll spend an hour working out what the passage means and what God is saying through it to us. The joy is, over time, seeing young people start to see the world as God has revealed it to be, and start to see how relevant Jesus’ finished work is to their life. To see them link up different parts of Scripture and start to understand how the big story fits together. To realise, without being told, that there are patterns of behaviour in their life they need to repent of. To see them delighted in how good Jesus is. It’s such an empowering activity because they get to understand that God speaks to them through his word, which they can read and understand for themselves. It’s great.
That’s not to say it’s not hard work though. It totally is. But the energy for the leader is spent in prayerfully wrestling with Scripture to see what God is saying in it, and in thinking through how they’ll help the young people to see that.
So sometimes there are activities to help the young people understand what’s going on (we once recreated the desert camp of the Israelites out of Duplo blocks so we could visualise it) and always there is food to be cooked, but the time and energy for the session can be given over to the study of God’s word.
Often when I talk to people about this they say something like: ‘That’s great, but my young people couldn’t cope with it.’
Currently in our Bible studies about a third of the young people come from non-Christian homes and haven’t really encountered the Bible before they were 11. Half of the young people come from families on some kind of benefits. One former member obtained literally zero qualifications at school. It’s definitely hard work to begin with, to establish that reading and studying the Bible for an hour isn’t abnormal. But once that becomes established it’s amazing how simple things are, and how easy it is for new young people to join in.
After a while, the real challenge isn’t studying God’s word together, but finding food that picky eaters will eat every week.
Mark Walley is youth worker at All Souls’ Clubhouse (@ClubhouseW1). You can follow him on Twitter: @sparticus.
Image: Bible Study 2 by George Bannister, used under Creative Commons licence.