ALTHOUGH I’m a vicar now, when I was teenager I was totally wild. I was involved in street violence, always drunk.
I committed acts of vandalism, graffiti petty crime etc. etc. Why did I do this?
Sadly, but truly, I became this kind of person in my attempt to belong.
In my years as a minister I have learned that this is the biggest need people have. The need to belong, to be accepted, to matter to someone.
It is amazing the things that young people will do to feel accepted. Very few go out looking for trouble. There are some and they have the police.
But most young people in their efforts to belong and be accepted by their crowd find that they need to be as hard as the next man, or be able to take their beer as well, and display as indifferent an attitude towards authority.
Many young people feel so much on the outside. If they’re wonderfully good looking and have done well academically or at sport they may escape this sense of failure but many, many of our young people struggle with a deep sense of being ‘also rans’ and will do almost anything to disprove it amongst their peers.
What I desperately needed as a teenager was someone to listen to me. To hear and understand my anger.
There were plenty of people out there to tell me what to do but no-one to listen and be alongside and take me seriously.
This is why the street pastors are literally such a God send.
They are trained people able to get alongside our young people when they get into trouble.
Our busy life styles often mean there is no one to talk to at home, and teenagers don’t have listening conversations they simply throw statements at one another.
They need someone to be there for them and to LISTEN. WE all do.
When I was wandering down the central reservation of Mutley Plain, Plymouth, in 1964 drunk out of my mind when I should have been in the group van on my way to a gig in Cornwall, or with my head between my knees at 2.30am sitting over a city drain, I needed someone alongside me not someone to tell me what to do.
Well done the street pastors.