She was 15 and I was 23. She had been living in loose proximity to her older sister (21) in a caravan park somewhere on the outskirts of Brisbane. I was in the same city for a church leadership conference. She had been filling her days smoking dope and going to bed with a variety of the male residents of the van park. I had been learning to ‘move in the Spirit’ and experience an intimacy of quite a different kind. We met in an emergency accommodation youth shelter. She was there because she had nowhere to live and no family to belong to, I was there for a week of live-in ‘observation’ before returning to my church and home in North Queensland. The shelter manager gave me a summary of her story and it broke my heart. Her name was Sharon.
How does a 23-year-old, emerging church leader, living a comparatively comfortable and conservative lifestyle, offer meaningful support to a vulnerable, yet street-hardened, sexually active, homeless young woman? I didn’t have the faintest idea. My saving grace came in the form of the lounge room pool table. Sharon liked playing pool, so did I, neither of us were much good at the game but it gave us a point of contact. Over the following 3 or 4 days we played quite a few games of pool. During these times I would try to initiate meaningful conversation, the dialogue flowed like cement. By the end of the week I had found out one or two personal details about Sharon and we had one brief conversation about God. Most of the time we just played pool and exchanged the occasional sentence or two.
Towards the end of my final day at the shelter I was standing in the hall with my suitcase packed. Sharon walked past and I stopped her to say goodbye. Her eyes opened wide with surprise and she said, ‘where are you going?’ I thought that she had picked up, through general conversation, the fact that I was just a visiting ‘worker’. She hadn’t, and when I told her that I was going back home to Townsville, she started crying. I was stunned, I really had no idea that my coming or going would make any real difference to the street-wise, independent, young woman I had tried (unsuccessfully I thought) to get to know.
Reflecting on this scenario, I realised that, despite the awkwardness of my conversational attempts and my feelings of irrelevance, I had managed to convey a meaningful non-verbal message. My attempts to ‘be’ with Sharon during the week had in someway ‘spoken’ to her need for authentic companionship in the midst of a dark and lonely and confusing experience. I hadn’t done a thing to alleviate her logistic or social circumstances, I hadn’t helped her to work out any kind of long-term strategy for her future accommodation scenario (others in the service were attempting to address these important issues). I simply offered her the security and comfort of caring presence.
The ministry of presence is at the very heart of meaningful youth work. I have so many memories of turning up to youth group gatherings on a Friday night, and having at least 5 or 6 teenagers all at once trying to tell me about the events and experiences of their week. What’s that all about? Its about a mixture of things really. Its about the fascination that young people have with their own lives. Its about the need that young people have for the validation of their experience and existence. Its about the need for adult comfort in times of pain and vulnerability. Its about the need for a kind of security which can only be met by the availability and attentiveness of a safe and familiar older person.
Recently, at a mother’s day service in my home congregation, the worship leader invited people to talk about a significant memory of ‘being mothered’. One man spoke of his mother’s support of his life-long passion for cricket. His significant memory was simply that, at every game he played, he knew that at some time during the day’s play he’d look up to see his mother’s car parked outside the boundary. She might stay just for half an hour, or an hour of play, but every game he could count on her presence for some part of the match. A woman in the congregation stood to recount, in tears, her memory of her mum canceling an important evening engagement to stay home and spend time with her after she’d had a particularly bad day at school during her year 7. For both these 30-something people, now both parents themselves, the outstanding memories of their own experience of being parented had to do with the ministry of presence.
Of course we are all aware that the kind of parental presence, represented in the above stories, is all too rare a commodity in the context of the complex demands of contemporary life. Even for those young people who are blessed with an attentive and available parent/s, the proverbial truism , ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, calls for a broader response to the presence needs of young people. This calling has so much to say to our philosophy and practice of youth work.
I’m always a least a little disturbed by ‘outcome’ or ‘purpose-driven’ approaches to youth work, and to ministry and people work in general. Youth workers in the welfare/community sector are increasingly under pressure to prove the value of their service through documented evidence of client ‘outcomes’. The funding bodies of such services will tend to define these outcomes in socio-economic quantifiable terms. Therefore, it becomes all-important to demonstrate the fact that the ‘client’ is being enabled to successfully engage with the culturally orthodox systems of education, training and employment. In the process of demonstrating that ‘clients’ are being adequately motivated and supported in the quest for the Western cultural ‘Holy Grail’ of economic independence, the far more difficult to measure, holistic and quality-based approaches to youth work are under-valued and pushed to the margins. The ministry of presence, if recognized at all, comes to be viewed as an optional extra, rather than as the core business of youth work.
A similar dynamic can also affect church and para-church based approaches to youth work. In the Christian sub-cultural context of youth work, outcome-focus is stated in terms of ‘discipleship’ and ‘spiritual growth’. The discipleship-outcome driven youth ministry is often characterised by a programmatic and systematic process which is focussed on moving young people through a series of ‘stages’ in their spiritual development. Purpose statement-style slogans such as, ‘making fully-fledged disciples’, tend to reflect a ‘production-line’ approach to ministry. In the outcome-focussed Christian youth work culture, every relational and community experience must demonstrate a pragmatic developmental outcome to validate its existence. Small group ministry must be specifically structured around the core strategies and goals of the overall program. Mentoring relationships must be intentional, contractual and developmentally productive. The ministry of presence, if it operates at all, is viewed as a means towards an end: the relationship becomes the subservient medium to the all- important pragmatic ‘spiritual’ goal.
Now, I’m playing something of a devil’s advocate game with regard to my criticism of outcome-focussed youth work. I’m really not opposed to the idea of developmental goals and strategies. The concepts of economic independence and spiritual development obviously represent important transitional tasks which have huge potential to impact a young person’s sense of dignity, self-worth and ability to play out a meaningful role both in society and in the Kingdom. However, I am genuinely concerned that in our approach to youth work, pragmatism, structuralism and professionalism do not displace the essential gift and way of being with young people which is suggested by my use of the phrase ‘ministry of presence’.
Continue reading The Ministry of Presence by downloading the entire essay below:
Download the entire essay: The Ministry of Presence – A reflection on the essential ‘work’ of youth ministry. by Phil Daughtry (pdf)
About The Author:
Phil’s specialty is the spiritual & professional formation of new youth workers & the dialogue between Christian spirituality & contemporary society and professional life.
Phil can be contacted on pdaughtry@adelaide.tabor.edu.au
About djwright
