Tom Clark has been leading Youth Ministry at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) for five years. Recently, I sat down with Tom to talk about some of the things they’ve learned along the way.
LP: What’s the vision for youth ministry at HTB?
TC: For a while now, the vision for HTB Youth has been about creating spaces where young people thrive. The word became an acrostic during a later team retreat and has stuck ever since for us: Treasure God, Have Fun, Realise identity, Influence society, Value all Emulate Christ.
At the moment, we’re trying to create a culture of peer-to-peer evangelism, where young people feel comfortable telling others about their faith and bring them along to gatherings.
LP: What are you doing around that?
TC: We realised the first thing to do in creating that culture, is to create an environment of prayer. But it actually happened through the young people, not us. Last year, one of them came to us asking if they could run a “digital detox”. We thought it was a great idea, so we decided to do it.
Everyone turned off their phones for 24 hours and we locked ourselves in the church, stayed up all night and had an amazing time. Some young people led worship, we wrote some songs, we prayed for our friends, about our dreams, for different areas in the world and everything else we could think of. That was the first stage really.
LP: What was the impact of spending time as a group in prayer?
TC: The impact it had on our young people was amazing. Two of them even decided they wanted to run Youth Alpha in their schools, so we already had a great opportunity to start creating a culture of evangelism.
LP: What was the next step in making that happen?
TC: This is where it gets practical: coaching young people and resourcing them practically in what they want to do. We’ve been trying to do a lot around that.
We met up with the two people who wanted to run Alpha for coffee, to help them work out the finer details of what it might look like, starting to dream with them and asking practical questions to help them work out the details. Now they’re working on it with some friends and seeking permission to run the course from their headteachers.
LP: Are you doing any training with them around how to invite people along?
TC: I was recently reminded of the importance of that; enabling young people to be bold in inviting their friends to church. One guy, Jack, brought two friends to a worship night, which they loved! It was so encouraging to everyone and highlighted just how important it is to be proactive in training young people on how to share their faith. So we’re planning the whole of our next youth weekend away around an evangelism theme.
The cool thing about challenging them in evangelism is how it stretches them in their faith, too – we baptised 5 young people two months ago, which is just awesome to see them making a public declaration about their relationship with Jesus. It seems to be a sort of catalyst that is taking us beyond where we’ve been before as a youth group.
It’s quite exciting and scary; we don’t know what it’ll look like or where it will go yet, but we know this is important if we want to see more young people coming through our doors. The best way to reach young people is through young people themselves – it’s an exciting challenge for them and even more exciting to watch.
LP: The Focus Youth events are getting pretty big now, looks like a lot of people are enjoying those and inviting friends along, too. What’s happening there?
TC: There’s definitely an element of ‘critical mass’ that we’ve reached as a youth group which helps, but it’s crazy how those events have grown. We initially started them as a gathering for the young people who came to HTB Focus, so they could meet-up throughout the year instead of just having a great time in the summer. What actually has happened there has surprised all of us – people are coming from miles away, bringing their whole youth group along and inviting other friends too! We never actually envisioned it growing beyond the Focus network, but we’re rolling with it and can’t wait for the next one!