Change Makers at Home

I’m Josh and this is my story…

I love working with young people. I spend most of my time working with troubled or vulnerable ones. Each week I engage with 30 or 40 young people who have been involved in criminal activity whether that’s through my work with a Young Offenders Team or through the church youth club I run. I get to go through lots of the issues they have in their lives, whether at home or at school and hopefully to make a positive impact on their lives.

Everywhere I work, I’m dealing with the same questions and issues. Young people want to know where they belong, who they are going to be, what to do with the potential they see themselves as having. Everyone wants to be somebody. We are trying to show them that yes, they can be somebody, they can achieve positively, by going down a different route.

Take a drug dealer, for example: They’ve got entrepreneur skills, they understand maths, and they deal with budgets, profit margins, stock takes, and understand market forces. They’ve got all these amazing skills if only they would channel them in a different way. But they don’t see it, they don’t see the potential they have in that way.

When I was growing up I had people around me who supported me when I made the wrong decisions, but so many of the kids I meet today don’t have that. I think I was given that amazing chance to make things right or say, ‘God I’m sorry, how do I make things right?’ I really want to be there for these young people and give them the same opportunities.

I believe that people will change their lives around most effectively when they have consistent support from someone. I think it’s so important that the young people know that every week, whatever happens, I’m still there. I really want to show God’s love to them, so I am committed to them week in, week out.   

It’s so easy for people to come in, do a project and then go. You build people up, make them feel great and that they can actually achieve something, and then not give them the support they need to see it through. If they don’t have the support network already around them, they will fail. Once you’ve tried to pick people up, if you’re not there when something goes wrong, they can slip further back than where they were before. That’s why consistency is so important.

A lot of the time it feels like you’re banging your head against a brick wall. So many of them are so brilliant, but can’t see it. They just can’t seem to do anything about it.

The young people on my estate are dealing with big issues, and we often only see change in small steps. But through the church youth club we are showing them this is who God is, this is what God says about us and we want to live this way to honour him. I know first hand the power Jesus has to turn a young person’s life around; that Jesus believes in and loves each one of the young people I connect with.

I don’t always have the courage to explain that it’s because of Jesus that I’m doing this work. I’m so often in situations where I think I need to say something, I can feel God prompting me. And I don’t. We are worried about the reaction we’re going to get, about the impact it will have on our relationship with that person, we justify it by saying, ‘if I say something, it might push them away, they might never come back.’

But if we really believe Jesus has the power to transform lives, if the gospel really is true, then surely someone being mean to us or stopping talking to us is a risk worth taking.If no one ever tells them because we are all scared, then how are they ever going to know?

I think: what if no one ever told me? What if I had never known?

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