Category Archives: Life

Young Peoples Sunday

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Press release Press release Press release Press release

Frontier Youth Trust calls for urgent investment in young people.

9 months of research into the future of Christian Youth Work in England

has culminated in a urgent appeal to Government Ministers to take youth work more seriously and to Denominational heads to motive their Churches to action.

FYT is calling for Churches and Christian organisations to commit 25% of their income on working with young people, particularly marginalised young people, in order to take the needs of those outside of the church more seriously.

‘With the media tending to demonise young people with such negative reporting , many of the general public are afraid to be in conversation with them. Christians need to sloth off their fears and engage with a generation that will soon give up entirely on the church if we are not careful,’ says Dave Wiles, Chief Executive of FYT.

Working in partnership with ‘2009: Year of The Child ’, Frontier Youth Trust is currently developing a FREE resource to assist Churches in celebrating young people in their communities and empowering them to reach their potential. Entitled, Young People’s Sunday, the resource will offer material and tools to help churches celebrate young people throughout 2009.

Church leaders are asked to pledge their commitment to working towards these objectives and specifically respond to the challenges with a firm undertaking to take appropriate action. Churches are also being prompted to lobby politicians to implement a commitment to long term funding of Christian faith based youth work by writing to MPs and Government ministers.

For further information, or to receive a resource pack for Young People’s Sunday, please email frontier@fyt.org.uk for details.

“A Letter to a Young Activist” by Thomas Merton

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Dear Jim,

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…

…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion…

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it before hand…

Enough of this… it is at least a gesture… I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best, in Christ,

Tom

The Garden grows

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So far the potatoes look good, carrots (purple and orange), beetroot, parsnips, lettuce, spring onions, spinach and cucumber are all popping out the ground. We are hardening off the corguettes, squashes, peppers and tomatoes, and have wild strawberries scattered around. Now the issue is to try not and let the slugs near or lose the veggies. My issue is that i have been quite disciplined this year with weeding so far but the idea of slug hunting by torchlight or keeping weeding is not my idea of a good night out. As a weak completer/finisher in personality type I see this now as an area for personal growth as well as veggie growth, but even typing about it fills me with horror. i fear the challenge is beyond me, can we overcome my nature with a little nurture?

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A course for community development workers and activists

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Exploring the Impact of Travel / Transport on Communities Course code B2
A course for community development workers and activists

Monday 2nd June 10.30 am – 4.00 pm (Tea and arrivals from 10.00 am)

Venue: The Resource Centre, 356 Holloway Road, London N7 6PA

The Federation for Community Development Learning are in partnership with TWICS as part of the Every Action Counts programme.

The Every Action Counts programme promotes collective actions and work within the voluntary and community sectors. Our overall programme aims to unlock learning, transferable knowledge and greater understanding of how to promote inclusive and accessible environmental actions for community groups and organisations.

This course is designed as an introduction to the impact of travel and transport on communities.

Aims:
· Introduce the principles an processes of community development as a way to challenge social exclusion and injustice

· Explore the themes of environmental and social justice as approaches and principles to travel and transport issues for communities.

Participants will have the opportunity to:
Identify the key themes and issues around transport affecting communities they are part of or are working with

Discuss the relevance of environmental and social justice approaches to taking action on travel themes with communities.

Identify opportunities for taking community action in response to themes raised during the course.

How to book a place
For more information and to reserve your place please download a form from our website at www.fcdl.org.uk or contact FCDL at admin@fcdl.org.uk or call us on 0114 253 6770 for a booking form and more information.

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