Categories: ecclesiastical-stuff, election-2010
Date: 05 May 2010 08:28:27
So David Milliband and Nick Clegg are going to be disrupting Durham life today, they are arriving a couple of hours apart to address students in the Durham Union building.
In this key Labour/ Lib Dem marginal with a lot of first time voters students are seen as worth investing time and energy in. What worries me with this is there is an implicit message that the students have more value than other voters in Durham who don't have this time and effort given to them. This is something which worries me and is a trap I think that the churches, (plural) in Durham also fall into at times.
Let me explain my worries. We are all working with limited resources, we all need to work out where to "focus" our energies and "young people" along with "the elderly" are easily identifiable groups. Yet in towns and cities like Durham, up and down our country there are lots of people who don't fit into these categories who equally need to hear about and experience God's love.
Going out with Streetlights I tend to encounter lots of "locals", and recognise their worth and value. Yet when I look around at where alot of the Christian energy goes into in the town it is into "students", with the noteable exception of work with children and the elderly.
As somebody very pointedly said when I asked if a volunteer was with the vicar factory the other week, "not everybody in Durham is a student". This is something I think we need to pay much more attention to, not just in Durham but in a range of university towns and cities. Yes students do have needs but universities tend to have chaplaincies and there is a huge range of support for them. They do need encouraging to vote, but they have student unions and so forth encouraging them to do so. I think we need to examine more how we can build bridges with and encourage those who do not come into this category. Their votes, their souls, their personhood is equally important!