Categories: uncategorized
Date: 19 March 2007 00:58:15
Today (well, looking at my watch, I now realise it was yesterday) I led our church youth discussion group for the first time. I'd already sat in for a couple of meetings as an observer, so the Vicar decided it was about time I should do one.
We currently have a Stewardship campaign going on at Church, so I thought I'd go along that route. The meeting lasts about an hour and a half. I was hoping and praying that they would have plenty to talk about as I'd prepared about enough material to keep me going for about half an hour. I thought it'd be OK, because kids of that age (12-16) are developing opinions of their own and tend to express them extremely vociferously.
I started out with a quiz on third world poverty. This went down very well. I was intending to move on to the subject of Fair Trade somewhat later in the meeting, but one lad, aged 15, very bright and with very strong opinions on matters of social justice, suddenly went off on a rant about Nestle and how they provided free baby milk formula for poor people in Africa and why it was so immoral because they lived in villages without a clean water supply so had to make the formula from contaminated water and most of these people were illiterate because they didn't have access to a decent education like we do in the west so they couldn't even read the instructions how to mix the formula properly and when the big global people stopped providing the free formula the mothers' milk had dried up and the babies had become addicted to the formula anyway but the parents couldn't afford to buy it for themselves.
Yes, I know that was a very long sentence without any commas, but that is just how this lad was speaking! He's too young to remember when all this was happening at the time, so he's obviously been doing his homework. All in all a great discussion ensued and we actually ran out of time!
There's been a lot in the news recently about teenage gang crime and kids getting stabbed or shot etc. This is only in the news cos it's so unusual it's newsworthy. The bunch of teenagers in the youth group at my church, I'm convinced, are far more representative of the majority of teenagers in this world. Deep thinking kids with a strong sense of social responsibility, but who also find the space to go out and have a good time.
Long may it continue.