Building Relationships and Trust Over Time
by Alan Scott
I’ve been the Youth and Children’s Outreach Worker at Partick Trinity Church for 12 years now and throughout my time I have faced a number of challenges & many different situations when it comes to trying to connect with local schools. I was in a very fortunate position when I came to this post because relationships had been built by the previous worker in the 2 main schools that my role focussed on and this was made possible through partnering with the Wheel Trust (an SU associate trust working in Glasgow’s West End). I see the benefit to working in teams because being on your own can be a really challenging and discouraging place.
When I first started in my role, my focus was on establishing regular work in 1 local primary school and 1 local secondary school to ensure that I could offer them both a decent amount of time to support the staff and pupils and build good lasting relationships. The previous worker had established an SU group in the secondary school so it was important to meet the head teacher to introduce myself and ensure this group could continue to run weekly. I also quickly became involved with the Wheel Trust & Wellington Church’s COSY Café team – this was great for building connections with both pupils and the team and also gives a good platform of promoting the concept of ‘Fairtrade’. We had a great opportunity through this group to invite the pupils to youth groups taking place within the local churches.
The Wheel Trust do a lot of work in this high school which became more needed during and after the pandemic. The Wheel Trust are now part of the Support For Learning Team and run regular sleep courses, health & wellbeing courses (Flourish Project – by The Proton Foundation) & many more groups which shows the need for youth workers and churches to step up and offer to help their local schools. Funding is being cut all across the board for schools so if a young person is struggling with their mental health, Additional Support Needs or life in general it can sometimes take up to 2 years after referral to get them an appointment with a specialist in the education environment. In my opinion this is where churches/youth organisations can step up and work with local schools where possible. I am not saying we can be the complete answer but we can be a help along the way and fill a gap that has been left because of funding cuts. In the west end of Glasgow Partick Trinity & many other churches and their youth workers, who partner with the Wheel Trust are doing the same in their local schools too because the need is so big. This is a great opportunity to show Jesus to all those that we meet in a very practical way.
The primary school was a very different experience for me than the secondary School. They were open to me helping out as a volunteer but they made it very clear that there would be no Christian input at all. This was something I really battled with as a newly trained, enthusiastic, evangelical youth worker but, supported by my leadership team, I decided to take them up on their offer and trusted that God would use this to help build relationships and break down any barriers or misconceptions that the school may have had.
My next step was to have a meeting with the head teacher to introduce myself, find out a bit about the school and see what their needs were. This meeting resulted in me volunteering 3 afternoons a week helping with lunchtime football activities, this was right up my street because anyone who knows me will know that I am so passionate about sport, especially football. This didn’t seem like a lot of work for me at the time & I struggled a bit because I wasn’t sure at first if I was doing God’s work, but I turned up faithfully every week and had amazing opportunities to speak one to one with the Head Teacher, other teachers and lots of pupils. Some days it was easy to do and others were a real struggle because I felt like I wanted to “do more” for God.
Reflecting on that season now, I can see it was essential in order to earn trust, build relationships with the school leadership team and prepare the ground for what was to come next. From those many years of faithfully turning up, smiling and chatting with the staff and pupils, so many more opportunities have come my way. These opportunities didn’t come overnight - it took years of preparing the ground and praying and trusting God for breakthrough, as I was often told by others “don’t bother with that school! You are wasting your time”. God had other plans though.
After a few years of doing this, I was asked if I could lead a Golden Time Craft Group which I did on a Friday afternoon every week. This put me in contact with more pupils regularly and allowed me to advertise one of my youth groups too which resulted in quite a few of them coming along over the years. Then after this I was approached to be one of the Football Coaches of the School football team. This led to meeting loads more teachers and pupils. After I had taken on this role for around a year, the opportunities kept coming. Around this time was when the school’s Head Teacher retired - the assistant head became the new Head Teacher. This led to many more opportunities within the school including some Christian Religious and Moral Education (RME) input too, such as: Christmas & Easter Workshops with the Wheel Trust, being asked into classes to answer questions about Easter and Christmas & more recently being approached by one of the other Christian teachers in the school to help her with trying to establish an SU Group.
God is still continuing to bring more opportunities my way too as Karen from the Wheel Trust and I undertook training to be able to deliver the Flourish & Gilly The Giraffe wellbeing courses as there was a real need for this within the schools that we worked in. The schools now ask us to deliver these courses regularly throughout the year which involves us working with around 60 young people aged from P4-P7 each year. There is a real need in the digital world that we live in, to help young people to realise their full potential as bad mental health, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem are so common in a lot of the pupils that we meet on a daily basis.
Over the years we have seen a number of the young people from our schools work crossing over to our youth groups in the church because of how they have been accepted for who they are, supported & helped in their school environment. This is sometimes quite a slow process but when it happens it is a real joy to see and makes all of the schools work worthwhile. Recently a girl who I met in P5 (when I first started my job) who openly said she wanted nothing to do with God, came to SU Camp last summer, became a Christian and has been baptised. This all came from the on the ground schools work. God works in the finer details and has a plan that is much greater than ours.
Throughout all of this schools work over the past 12 years there have been many challenges that I have seen young people struggling with ranging from: depression, anxiety, loneliness, not being able to sleep, confusion about gender and not being able to deal with trauma(the list could go on!). All of this stuff is real and if I’m being honest I/we don’t have all of the skills, time or abilities to solve all of their problems but what we can do is accept them, encourage them and take whatever opportunities come our way in schools. These little opportunities can be the glimmer of hope a young person needs at that time which can lead to greater things for them and their future.
From my own experience of meeting hundreds and hundreds of young people I can conclude that every one of them are looking for 3 key things in their lives: Identity, belonging and purpose and these things come from one place and that is faith in Jesus Christ. We may not be able to teach the Bible in some of the schools that we work in, but we can be his hands and feet so that people see him in how we act. Then through those little steps opportunities will come our way in God’s perfect timing. Serving your local school at this time is very much needed because schools, teachers and pupils need all of the support they can get in a time when funding and staff cuts are at their worst. Find a way of making contact and see where it takes you. No task is too small or trivial because God will use it to do great things if we are faithful to him but it takes time so stick with it.
