Learning from the Streets

So , there I was, armed with 5 years of lived in youth ministry from a middle class, midlands based evangelical church, and a weeks worth of ‘training’ , with a group of three other gap year students, landed in a ‘tough’ estate in the north east of England for a year, the year 1996. A year to ‘do mission’ a year to ‘do youth ministry’ a year to ‘redeem Hartlepool’ , a year to support the local church.

Or so I thought.

So what did we do? What did I do as the ‘team leader’ ?

There are probably many more confessions of a young youth minister that could be just ‘confessions of an Oasis Frontliner’ but most of them created the rule changes internally, rather than cause too much angst and shame. There probably are other stories to tell, but this one is the first, and involves something known as prayer walking..

The first month, of an 8 month gap year that I was on, was shaped as being a time to ‘get to know’ the neighbourhood – it would be what I would suggest takes a year to do in a 3-5 year plan, but we had a month in a gap year of 8 months, and if I remember rightly we did have some kind of community profile task to do, which meant in the days before the internet, a trip to the library and looking at local history, and trying to talk to a few people.

One of the ways we thought we would do this was to do some ‘prayer walking’ around the community. So, as team, we figured out routes, maps and pairs, and armed with 4 versions of evangelical faith (from prophetic, to charismatic to anglican) we set out on a prayer walk, not just ‘a’ walk – but a prayer walk.

Our aims for it were complex and ambitious, they were either to get to know the estate/ remove the estate of demons/ pray for those who looked like they needed it/ lay hands on difficult areas/ and to publicly pray out loud in places so that people might just ‘see the love of God’ in action.

Yes we were going for all of these.

At least, those where all the rhetoric in the prayers before all the walking starting, as we energised ourselves by praying louder and more enthusiastic before we left the house. Not only that but probably add a small dose of revival, blessing and long term generational change by our obedient walking actions, were all reverently called down to the Lord above for.

So we walked.

And oh my, do I cringe now.

I confess to standing and laying hands on the graffiti on a toilet block in the recreation ground, and feeling a ‘spirit’ of oppression in the parks and football pitches and going full jugular, crying before the Lord in angst at the lack of Godliness in the place. As we walked, in mournful prayerful attitude I remember how we would look for all the signs of where God wasnt in the place, where there was so obvious needs, like half naked 6 yr old boys on bike with no shoes on, like the graffiti, and any item that we could interpret as being not godly. The tattoo shop was one, as was the betting shop, we made assertions about some houses, that were probably not merited.

Strange that the middle class, privately owned houses seemed to have less demons around them.

Then we discovered the loose cassette tape.

We started to find cassette tape around the estate, and equated this, after much careful research and ‘amateur demonic prayer insight’ that the cassette tape was laid down by local witches who were marking their evilness around by use of loose cassette tape. From then on, for the next 7 months , any walking around the estate involved picking up cassette tape, that we ‘knew’ had demonic music on it (it wasnt video tape), and then the more we picked up, the more that got left. We saw it everywhere.

We became cassette tape warriors for the estate.

As I look back, over 20 years, with a mixture of shame and embarrassment at being the first month into a voluntary gap year with a large evangelical organisation in the mid 1990’s, I confess that it wasnt the organisation that encouraged us to do this specific thing, it wasnt its values, it was us, it was me.

Saving others and fixing others was what I thought I had to do, and part of the prayer walking, I realise, was to identify all the areas in the community where I, we, or God could fix, solve or redeem. Also, that I, and our team were the called people to help God identify the right areas to start this.

I imagine God laughing at us going, ‘it was just a play park’ whilst I was praying the demons out of an abandoned slide or swings that had been broken. At the time, I thought I was seeing like God was seeing, brokenness, hurt and evil – what I ignored was how things could be seen as good, hopeful and already a place where God was at work. I was only seeing the community in a way that gave me more work to do to fix it.

Also I was, and as a team we were, doing our best to justify our existence in a place, and my word we must have looked so odd, so out of place, and despite a few young people we did get to know, because none of our high aims were met, it was easy to go about judging the estate as a hard one, a tough one, and one in which the witches with the cassette tape had claimed as their own. Better to do that than think that we might have been wrong.

So yeah, confessions of a very young ‘Oasis Frontliner’ or volunteer youth minister, a tale from the mid nineties, a tale of ‘community profiling’ that was all sorts of weird, coupled with a mess of mid nineties post ‘toronto blessing, midst of vineyard power evangelism’ state in the UK, and one fresh faced me, wanting to save the world.

There might be more to follow….actually…I think its fairly likely….