We are looking for an energetic evangelist with excellent interpersonal skills. We are looking for someone full time, with a passion and a gift to communicate with young people and an ability to lead and recruit a highly motivated team of volunteers to coordinate and deliver residentials for Youth for Christ including the Fort Rocky project. The successful candidate will be highly personable, a creative problem solver and have the ability to manage projects and communicate clearly.
Closes 1st of Feb.
]]>But isn't this quite a low view of your website and your readers? Sure, if no-one ever comments and when they do it's nonsense then comments are pointless, but you reader are going to find intelligent things to say frequently enough right? Let's assume that happens, say a thriving comment community develops. Now every article contains the text "comments (14)" at the bottom. Now when you finishing reading an entry you have to decide whether to click afterwards on the link to read the comments. And when you have to make that decision you've immediately lost the elegance of knowing once you're read the entire front page you've read all the recent content there is. There isn't one page to read, there are however many articles with comments greater than zero pages to read. And that may not seem like much of a hassle but it's hassle I'm not bothering people with.
They aren't the only reasons though. A reason I probably take too much pride in is that it's nice that every single word on this site that is not in quote marks was written by me. It means I can't blame someone else for what I say; I have to take responsibility for it. But more it means everyone knows who wrote this content here.
There are other things too, all the niggles. Spam comments, offensive comments, comments that aren't technically spam but are nonsensical. Ethical problems with deciding whether things get culled or don't get culled. When a big part of this website is collecting and curating things that are interesting, having to do that to comments that turn up becomes a real effort. These things are a hassle that I can't be bothered to deal with.
But what about a right of reply? Well, obviously you can reply, but you might have to do that by email, or on your own web site, or via twitter. And I'll probably reply to you, or link to you, or quote you in full here. And then we'll actually be having a thought through conversation. It'll be nice.
]]>February: Your minibus breaks down, the parts that need replacing are the alternator and cambelt and you'll need to jump start the engine (remember the battery is under the seat). Unfortunately you'll forget this prophetic knowledge untill after you break down. Still, at least now you can be more confident speaking to the AA.
March: Justin Bieber comes out. Of hiding! To publicise his 9th album Justin Bieber goes into Where's Wally style hiding with whichever fan finds him winning a life time supply of phone calls to friends proving that they've met Justin Bieber (he's a big fan of Dostoevsky, who would have thought). He gives up after two weeks when his Kindle battery finally dies. Practically for you, this means those three fourteen year old girls can finally attend youth club without turning over the entire church building just in case he's hiding under the pews.
April: Being cool goes out of fashion. Seeing as your entire outreach ministry is based around being cool you're forced to radically rethink how you do things. You try not being cool for a bit, but that's considered cool, and so out of fashion.
May: Camarthenshire, Northumberland, and the London Borough of Barnet are the last councils left funding youth work. This leads to mass immigration, giving Northumberland the highest ratio of youth worker to young person ever. It also means the Berwick Upon Tweed Argos never has any table tennis equipment in stock.
June: Finally, the new pool table arrives. Except it's a swimming pool in the shape of a table. Confusion reigns as you can't return it. But then the young people being young people come up with a brilliant new game that combines the best of pool, the best of water polo and the best of that game where you have to hook ducks with a fishing rod in fairgrounds.
July: As exams come to a close the greatest change in schooling in the history of the world happens, completely ruining your entire schools work plan. However as this year in preview concerns youth work not schools work we're not at liberty to tell you what happens.
August: After watching hours and hours of the Olympics your young people become obsessed with trying out these new sports. To save money you use the same equipment for fencing, javelin throwing, and the pole vault. This is a terrible idea.
September: The great mystery of the pool table is solved when you come to open up the baptistry and find instead a pool table built into the floor below the pulpit. You can't get it out, so you make the best of the situation and baptise the people in the youth centre pool table. A few weeks later you find the church warden sneakily improving his putting on the baptistry.
October: Call of Honour Battle Warfare Ops II is released. Your boys work starts to shut down as more and more teenagers stay in playing online. You buy a copy so you can continue your series "temptations we all face" over XBOX live. Turns out one temptation we all face that you hadn't written a session on is rage-quitting team firefight when your so called team-mates repeatedly snipe you in the back of the head while pretending they haven't turned friendly fire on.
November: Your numbers still haven't picked up since the April cool debacle. And then realisation dawns, it wasn't that cool isn't fashionable anymore, it's that you being cool isn't fashionable anymore. You resign.
December: Yourself to getting old. Sorry. You resign yourself to getting old. Phew. You still manage to finish the year with a job.
]]>]]>The interpretation that Mark offers of my book is different to my intentions in writing it. What I intended to do in the first chapter was give a little bit of context for youth ministry today. The only philosophy I was communicating was that youth work should be multi-faceted and the intention of that was to promote a more holistic view of youth ministry, one that looked at the whole life of the young person and one which encouraged looking at youth work through a variety of roles to encourage a wider range of people to get involved with work with young people as I believe that young people benefit from having a wide range of Christian role models. The views in the chapter were mine, I did not consult with anyone else when I wrote it so it shouldn't be seen as the CYM view. The bit of the introduction that was most significant to me is that which wasn't addressed in the critique. I begin and finish the introduction by talking about love and this is what underpins what I believe and what I thought I was saying. After some examples I write "I started wondering what the implications were for those of us who talk about a God of love, and how yet again we may need to revisit the way we try to communicate the gospel to young people". Thus my first comment about youth work overtly talks about communicating the gospel to young people and I finish this introduction by talking about attaining our goal of building the Kingdom of God among young people and quoting in full Eph 3.16-21 which talks about knowing God's love and finishing with giving glory to God in the church. It would be impossible to believe and write that if my philosophy on youth ministry was as described.
I think my theology has perhaps become more implicit and in saying about abundant life from John 10.10 I strongly believe that this is found in Jesus but for those who are not willing to commit to Jesus we still have a responsibility to help them fulfil their potential and be concerned about their well-being. I regularly challenge students as to how and when they give young people an opportunity to respond to the gospel and share the critique we made in the Faith of Generation Y that young people want to talk about spiritual things more often than youth workers give them the chance. My comments about everything else were framed in the earlier comment about communicating the gospel to young people but that isn't mentioned in the review. The bit about Shalom was supposed to communicate that what we are helping young people achieve is Shalom which is a biblical concept that means so much more than how it is often expressed which is peace. The link to Every Child Matters was supposed to show that we can communicate to those we work with outside of the church in terms that they understand but which for us have a biblical resonance and underpinning. Quite a lot of youth work now gets external funding and learning how to connect biblical principles and professional practice can be quite important. Implicit in being made in the image of God is that each individual human has worth and potential. I have spent 30+ years working with young people on the edges and margins of society who have little sense of this worth and little vision for potential. However, I always believe this is best accomplished through a relationship with Jesus.
I am sorry if my writing was unclear but feel that the framing of the entire chapter within the context of communicating God's love, communicating the gospel and building the Kingdom did show that I have at the heart of my ministry a desire that young people encounter Jesus and have an opportunity to respond. Thus I feel a misrepresented and appreciate this opportunity to put forward my perspective.