VOLUNTARY AND COMMUNITY SECTOR – YOUTH WORK PRACTICE

The Campaign has been criticised correctly for being weak in its understanding of the renaissance of Faith Youth Work, failing to integrate this important phenomenon into its overall analysis. Thus it is illuminating and revealing to read Naomi Stanton’s thoughts on her research into how the church responds to the needs of young women.

It begins:

I often find myself frustrated with the amount of discussion I hear about how churches are isolating men. This seems to be a big concern for many churches and commentators. The ‘Man Up!’ article written by Sam Gibb a few years ago and re-published recently by SJI, in Fresh Thoughts is just one example. Gibb suggests that ‘Sitting on cold, hard pews, singing love songs and drinking tea with old people are not things that many guys want to spend their Sunday mornings doing’.

However, it is not what a lot of us women want to do either – we do not come with some burning desire to sit on cold seats and sip tea with old people. Some of us can’t even sing. Many of the young adults, male and female, in my recent research in churches felt their congregations didn’t like them very much at all, let alone want them to sit and drink tea with them. So why is there so much talk about how men’s needs are not met within churches but less so about women?

Read it in full on Fresh Thoughts – Confessions of a Female Youth Worker