I met a grandmother who told me she loved her grandson but she was concerned that he didn’t have faith. I asked her if she’d give me a tenner if I could prove he did. She was surprised and asked what I meant. So I told her various stories of Silcoates Chapel and of the leadership role the young man played there and how he had grown in so many ways in the eight years I’d known him. ‘But he doesn’t come to church with me’ she said. I enquired if there were any other teenagers at the church she attended. ‘None’ she confirmed.
Maybe you know a church like that. Often mono-generational, or at least dominated by the generation passed retirement age, there is a pattern of practice and attitude in such places that says ‘This is proper church: one hour on Sundays, all committees and rotas up to date’. Moreover it disregards those who come on Tuesday morning to ‘Toddlers’ or Friday evening to ‘Scouts’, seeing these of lesser value and even ‘They’re not our Brownies’.
Well I know another pattern and that’s just as ‘proper’. It’s a place where young people have opportunity to find their own voice about faith and how to practice it, where they grow as leaders and theologians. After what may be five to ten years, they leave, as some will do this summer, but for the time they were part of it Silcoates Chapel is rightly church to them, on any day of the week and whatever we are doing.
The multi-generational church of my childhood was dwindling even then, over forty years ago, so the challenge is not a new one. Neither is it a competition: Sunday church and weekday church may be different expressions of the same urge to engage with faith in community. To engage with children and young people and share faith with them in this way is exciting and demanding. There have been some wonderful moments, like the stories I shared with the grandmother. ‘Did I win the tenner?’ I asked her.

In our life and and our believing
The Love of God