CALLS for more funding for youth work were heard in a debate, on Saturday morning, when the Synod received the Youth Department’s latest report.
Simon Henry (Down & Dromore) began by explaining how the Youth Department had recently launched an audit of youth work within the Church, hoping to collate precise numbers and data after the disruption of the pandemic. Parish youth ministry had really begun to get well from this shock only previously 18 months, he told the Synod. It was vital that the Church kept talking to its young people about what it meant to be made within the image of God, and to form a Christian world-view in them, Mr Henry said. “Our job is to pass on the religion that we’ve,” and this ministry needed continual support and financial investment. He asked the Synod to back his calls for more central funding from the Church.
Members were then shown a video of a few of the activities of the Youth Department over the past 12 months, including weekends away with young people in Ireland.
Hannah O’Neill (Kilmore, Elphin & Ardagh) said that the video “summed up how amazing young individuals are. . . They are the Church of the long run, but also they are the Church of today, with faith-filled and faith-fuelled ideas.” She said a recent Youth Forum was essential in helping the central Church listen properly to the voices of young people. “The young people were encouraged to make recent connections, to be a voice for change of their schools, parishes, and dioceses, and to deepen their faith and learn more about Jesus and his Church.” Ms O’Neill finished by thanking everybody within the Church who was working on the “coalface of youth ministry”, but called for more investment, as currently there was only, on average, one youth employee for each 13 parishes: “The harvest is plentiful, but the employees are few.”
Sally Siggins (Kilmore, Elphin & Ardagh), a member of the youth department’s board, said she wouldn’t be standing on the Synod were it not for dedicated youth employees in her parish 30 years ago. She urged churches to prioritise youth ministry.
Jan Peach (Down & Dromore), who’s the director of a Christian retreat centre, said that the Young Leaders in Ministry grant that they had received had been essential for them to develop their internship programme. She quoted from the book of Joel about young people prophesying, and said that the Synod must be encouraged that, across Ireland, young people were coming to Christ.
The Revd Clive Atkinson (Down & Dromore) spoke a couple of scheme, Project Y, which had grown out of his church, which sought to secure a paid youth employee based in a church in every town in Ireland. Could the Youth Department engage with this, too, he asked.
Jack Wilson (Down & Dromore), a youth employee himself, said that young people were missing from churches across the land, but that didn’t mean that Ireland had lost its youth. “They are only not where we’re.” He said that the Church needed to take its young people “more seriously”, investing finance, prayer, time, and creativity in them. Christian faith could possibly be an “oasis in a desert” for young people trying to seek out a firm footing in an unsettling world.
The Bishop of Meath & Kildare, the Most Revd Pat Storey, said that, for anyone still wondering if the under-45 rule (which compels every diocese to incorporate a clerical and lay representative aged 44 or below of their synodical delegation) achieved anything, the outcomes were plain throughout them.
The Archdeacon of Elphin, the Ven. Patrick Bamber (Kilmore, Elphin & Ardagh), praised the Young Leaders in Training fund, which had funded his son and an intern to go on a visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Andrew McCaw (Down & Dromore), a youth evangelist in East Belfast, said that the Church needed to work harder to incorporate young people from working-class backgrounds.
The Revd Raymond Kettyle (Down & Dromore) told the Synod how his church had swapped a poorly attended Sunday school with not more than seven children for a Friday-evening youth group, which now attracted 36 or more young people each week, a lot of whom weren’t connected to any church. There was no have to be cynical about youth ministry, he said: many young people were more interested than was thought.
