Sarah Crane is a Pastor for Youth and Children in Shoeburyness & Thorpe Bay Baptist Church, near Southend. She has blogged for us on her experience in preparing young people for uni.
When I arrived in Southend to work for my church in July 2010, I very hurriedly met those who were leaving for university or to start gap years that September. As they left we prayed for them and gave them a goodie bag of useful essentials to send them on their way. But we didn’t think about whether they’d have church families to go and we didn't do a great job at keeping in touch with them. That was sort of it. Amazingly, that year, almost all our students became connected to churches in the places they’d gone to.
Then came September 2011, and a shock to the system when one of our young people left much earlier than the others. I hadn’t even got round to doing the goodie bags for that year – the summer had been a bit hectic and it had slipped off my list of things to do – not very good!
Over the last academic year we have tried much harder to keep in touch with our students. Several people have been writing to them, we now have a map at the back of our church which says where each person has gone. We’ve linked each of them up with one of our adult small groups, to enable them to receive ongoing prayer support and meals when they’re home. Some even send the students a supermarket gift voucher to enable them to eat something more exciting than 9p noodles!
I hope and pray that they’ve felt connected to our church family as they’ve gone off on their first great adventure of their adult lives. Students can be a greatly ignored part of church life, causing them to feel like they don’t really fit in anywhere. I know for us, we want to do a better job with them because we’re passionate about them embracing whole life discipleship, discovering their gifts, finding places to serve and be a blessing, as well as being blessed by those they will meet. We want them to know their value, to know that we will miss their contribution to our church family, but mostly we will miss their presence.
We have nine young people heading off on gap years or to university this September, and we as a church will feel the gap that they will leave. We hope that we have equipped them in all ways possible in order to continue following Jesus.
This year we’re sending them off already connected to adult small groups. We also invited some of those who’d just finished university, or were back for the summer, to run a preparation for uni session and share their experience of university with our sixth form small group. They answered questions about the isolation you feel when the excitement wears off, and what it was like to find a church to be part of. We’ve spent time praying for them and registered them with Fusion’s Student Linkup. In the coming weeks we’re going to take them out for lunch and then send them off as missionaries in our first Student Linkup Sunday. Fusion provide prayer cards so that our church family will be reminded to pray for each of them.
We are planning to visit them in their first year away. I hope and pray that for our young people leaving us in September, their experience will be all that and more – that they may truly discover their potential to be used by our amazing God.
