Samuel was male, aged 39 and described himself as black British. His involvement in youth work started as a boy, participating in a uniformed organisation, which offered him progression routes into voluntary ‘youth leadership’ positions as a senior member and then as an adult, which he maintained for many years. After moving to another city, he sought out further voluntary work, with a community-based youth project, attached to a local church, in a deprived inner-city area, where he helped set up small, community events for children and families in partnership with the council and police, as well as working with young people. Samuel’s views changed as a result of this experience:
It was quite inspirational for me because traditionally I would have had the mindset of being very evangelical and stuff like that, but it helped me look at things from a different point of view, and working with different people, you know, and the Anglican church and the culture round that and everything it was a good experience for me. Samuel, Interview 1
Samuel made a significant move from an established career as a health care professional to go back to university to train as a youth worker / youth minister. He attributed this to ‘responding to a calling which I’ve had for years and a lot of people have told me but I’ve just
tried to ignore’, which included two church leaders inviting him to be part of the leadership
team and to train for ministry. Having identified and enrolled on the degree course at this college, his financial concerns about student loans were allayed when someone offered to pay his three-year course fees.
Samuel spoke a great deal about his youth work experience, interweaving his thinking about youth work with his ideas of faith. He spoke with real fondness of his voluntary work experience in a small inner-city youth project: the relationships he was able to make with ‘not the most easiest kids you could deal with’ and the compassion he felt for them was a key factor in his becoming more involved in working with young people. He was strongly aware of need and his desire to meet this need and work for greater social justice – telling a story about how shocked he was on realising that a seven year old child could not read the writing on children’s stickers they were giving out at a community event, and then considering young people’s experience of support networks: ‘I see a lot of people now sometimes –
especially the males – a lot of them don’t have a lot of positive male figures or males around them, and I think sometimes they do need some adult interaction with them.’ He saw his own
experience growing up and navigating the challenges he faced as a black young person in a deprived inner-city context as a strength he had to offer young people: helping them channel their ‘energy [arising from] social deprivation …. in the right direction’.
In talking about his past experience, Samuel outlined what became a recurring theme for him through the interviews: the relationship between his faith and his work.
When I did my first voluntary experience in [inner-city youth project], a lot of kids were very interested to find out what was different from a Christian youth worker and a youth worker, and I used to get called out “You’re not a youth worker, Samuel. You’re a Christian.” And I just used to … I just loved the interaction with these kids, knowing that they all had dreams and wanted to be footballers or wanted to do something different which could transform their estate, you know, because I thought there must be more to life than that. And I just thought that’s what being a Christian is about. You engage with people. It’s not … It’s not about being perfect. That’s how God uses everybody is [sic] he works on the imperfections. Samuel, Interview 1
Samuel spoke thoughtfully about social issues, his faith, his values and his work, and was preoccupied with how these might relate together and possibly coalesce into a Christian ‘mandate’: ‘my mandate as a Christian, how does that fit in, or am I supposed to fit in, or am I
compromised? Do I want to offend my funders or something like that?’ (Samuel, Interview 1).
He returned to this theme later in the first interview, when thinking about how his own values and his understanding of youth work values related together:
Is the modern-day Christian youth worker compromised where their mandate or whatever doesn’t have any significance? […] I think what makes me feel uncomfortable
sometimes is, I don’t know, I think sometimes I’m worried about being compromised … Samuel, Interview 1
He thought carefully about what he had to offer as a Christian, where his faith and Christian mandate ‘fitted in’ and how he might work in community settings in an open, sensitive and inclusive way without ‘compromising his faith’.
Samuel had chosen this particular college as it had a good academic reputation and also had a confessional intention which he hoped would help him, as a person of faith, engage with and work in ‘a post-modernistic world’. His two-year main placement had been arranged for him by the college. He was placed with a group of churches, linked by denomination, and located in diverse demographic areas across the conurbation, although he was predominantly doing youth work in one, inner-urban area, with a local church. By the second interview, Samuel had completed his alternative placement, which he done in schools with a local statutory youth service.