Youth ministry: Capital Youth

Youth Advocates play a significant role in helping and advising parishes in their area to explore ways in which they can engage with young people.

They are nominated by their area Bishop to lead the work on culture change; focusing on the 4 key areas of Listening, Hospitality, Leadership and Community.

Youth Advocates are clergy or youth ministers who have experience in and a passion for working with young people. They seek to actively listen to and represent the views of young people in London, so that decisions at all levels of our diocese are taken with consideration of how they will impact on young people.

Youth Advocates celebrate examples of successful youth ministry in the Diocese. In doing so they generate enthusiasm, encouraging others to get involved and maintaining momentum for Capital Youth.

There is already a great deal of focus — both in church and community schools — on improving the lives and developing the spirituality of young people. However, this has not resulted in many teenagers wanting to be part of our churches. Our latest research with 300 parishes shows no statistical link between a parish having a church school and higher numbers of young people. Therefore, we need to seek other ways of reaching young people to go alongside our ministry in schools, especially if our focus is on evangelism.

We have found through research into all Mission Fund giving, and the pilot of apprentices in the Willesden Area, that an apprenticeship scheme is the most reliable way we can fund ongoing youth work in a parish. The emphasis of our apprenticeship scheme on training a local young person and supporting them in post, has proven far more successful than the conventional model of recruiting youth workers on the open market, who are often from outside London and take time to find their feet.

Each Youth Minster is accountable for growing large numbers for their context and resourcing others to reach young people.

• St Andrew’s Enfield: leading in discipleship and transitions from children’s to youth work in a traditional liturgical context. Looking at how to be intentional in relational work
• St Peter’s Harrow: seeking to model serving one specific deanery, where there are already several churches with youth groups, as a resourcing hub
• Holy Trinity Brompton: an already-large church seeking to grow and provide models of resourcing others
• Christ Church W4: a partnership with The Message Trust and Latimer Minster as part of a multi-site church with one venue given totally to youth work
• St Saviour’s Sunbury: a minster based on mission to secondary schools

The data we have shows very low numbers of young people being part of our churches. This tells us that a new and radical approach is needed and that we don’t have the answers within our current experience, and so we have looked outside as well as inside the Diocese for ideas.

A large amount of consultation was carried out: we visited several key, growing youth evangelism projects to see how they were achieving this and to learn from them. We consulted a experts in the field including groups of youth workers from London, and we made use of existing reports that we have commissioned within the Diocese including the Bishop of London’s Mission Fund ten year anniversary report, and the external review of the Hackney Missioner project. We tested ideas with a number of groups, including our youth advocates.

In addition, we surveyed over 300 churches in the Diocese to establish the existing state and needs of youth ministry which reinforced our approach.

This is a key investment, and the Diocese has been successful in bidding for a £1.88m investment in Capital Youth from the Church of England’s Strategic Development Fund. The Diocese is committed to investing an additional £1.4m, and we will continue to fundraise to support this vision, having already secured funding for four paid workers and an apprentice.