By Amanda Wells
Six months of aimless basketball with Brockville’s youth paid off for Andrew Scott, whose community ministry is now attracting 60 people to its monthly dinners.
The Rev Andrew Scott spends most of his time as one of the ministers at Kaikorai Presbyterian but also works with Dunedin South Presbyterian and Brockville Community Church.
The development of a youth ministry in Brockville, which is an area of Dunedin often know for its economic deprivation, started with six months of basketball, says Andrew.
He then began a more conventional youth group, and in 2006 two people volunteered to become involved in youth leadership and another group was created.
One group, called “Explosive”, focused on the intermediate age while the other concentrated on this group’s younger siblings. This second group, called “Fish”, soon had 25 kids turning up on a regular basis.
Andrew says he started thinking about how to involve the children’s parents. “It’s no good trying to pull kids out of holes if you’re not going to do anything about families.”
So they invited the family of each young person to dinner once a month, on a Sunday evening.
Andrew says the meal is deliberately structured round a small-group activity, such as a quiz or creating sculptures, so that there is little down-time for kids to get bored and “charge around”.
The first dinner in February this year had 35 people present; about 60 people were present at the most recent dinner, with 60 percent of these being children. Andrew says the same people are continuing to attend, with probably only 100 different people in total so far.
The evenings are about trying to build relationships, he says. “In a community of 4000 people, we need to create multiple villages.”
“We would like to be able to say that we are dramatically impacting the Brockville community, not just the ones who are connected to the faith community.”
Andrew says that the team is upfront about “who we are and why we’re doing it; we’re not backwards about it”.
“If we’re not going to talk about Jesus then let’s not waste our time.”
But he says that helpers at the dinners don’t have a lot of time to sit and talk faith with parents; “it’s more that they see we’re not ‘weird’ Christians”.
“It’s been a really steep learning curve figuring out what works and doesn’t work.” Changes since the start have included having more people helping, spending more time preparing and setting up the venue, and having the teenage leaders much more prepared in terms of their role.
“We’d like to think that parents will start coming because they want to come not because their kids are there.” While children can turn up for the meal alone, they are not allowed to stay afterwards unless an adult is with them.
Andrew says the ministry has developed only because the Kaikorai and Brockville churches have given it the necessary space. “They funded me playing basketball for six months with no obvious outcome at that point.”
He’s now talking to the Department of Internal Affairs about funding a community worker full-time for three years; a proposal that is being seriously considered for 2008/2009. The Dunedin City Council is also talking about the possibility of a community grant.
Andrew says he sees part of his role as “telling the story”. “I think that’s more important than we give it credit; nothing we’ve done has been particularly complex or difficult.”
“We really need to be targeting and nurturing people who can do this kind of work.”