Upon comming home one of the common cerimonial rites is to catch up on everything that has happend since you were away. I find it strange how much more information you can find out actually being home rather than just hearing things over the telephone or emails.
One such conversation concerned my parents involvement with the youth group at a local church [which will have given the game/name away to many readers] and their hiring of staff. Now before I continue to state the deails they disclosed it is best to state my personal view point regard staff in the church which can pretty much be found in these series of article by my friend Andrew Brims on his blog, particularly post 2 in the series.
It has emerged that due to financial constraints brought about from the recession, in addition to the previous lack of success in finding a new full time youthworker for the 11-14year olds, the church was now going to only look for a part time worker [to join the current 2 full time paid youthworkers]. Some had registered their grievances with this decision due to the fact that there are some 120 youth listed on the registers of this churches directory, and if this was a church of this relative size they would certainly hire an administrator to assist in the running of the church. This may well be a fair point, yet as I have linked previously in this article I don't necessarily like this conclusion anyway.
The other point made was that in standard education, the best investment you can make is in smaller class sizes which I would agree with [although from a TEFL perspective a group of 3/4 can be more effective than a 1-2-1 or 1-2-2 class]. However the point I immediately thought was why don't we just get more people to volunteer (an admittedly crazy concept) as this would have this impact and if everyone took part in an aspect of the administration then it would reduce the need of another work to hopefully zero, plus having the whole church more engaged.
The response I received said a great deal to me. I was told that people just don't want to volunteer and that maybe this was why we now have to pay people to do the youthwork.
I have no doubt there is a great deal of truth in this but I think there is also a causal effect caused by hiring a youthworker as well. A few years back I spoke to a friend who was currently working as a youthworker and he said that as soon as he started to get paid the amount of volunteers at the church dropped as a result, and the same occurred again when he became full time rather than part time. This we presumed was because people thought that there was now someone being paid and so it wasn't necessary to volunteer as much.
I was worryingly reminded of the electric monk in one of the Douglas Adams books, which is there to do your spiritual thinking for you so that you don't have to and can concentrate on other things. Is this what we have started to treat youthworkers as? we pay them to teach our kids [in a separate location] so we no longer have to have spend our precious time volunteering or perhaps to make sure we get "fed" each week.
I should point out that I have a great many friends who are youthworkers who have made incredible differences in young peoples lives and I have happily given money to help them be available and free to help those that they work with so I am not taking away from the ministry of youthwork.
