Running Events
Recruiting Young People
This can be the hardest part of the process. We've learnt that there are often schools with large numbers of Muslim pupils but not Christians, and lots of church youth groups but not mosque ones. So we've recruited the Christians through churches and the Muslims through schools. This does mean that you have to try and put together a programme that will appeal to the school if they're going to back it and to a voluntary youth group, but it's not impossible as you'll see in the section on programme ideas.
If you're working with the under 18s (and our events tend to be for the 14-17 age group) then one of the most important things you'll need to do is find youth leaders and teachers who share your vision. If you can find a couple of leaders who are prepared to bring young people along, half the battle is won!
Be Clear About Aims and Theology
Leaders will often want to know why you're running an event and whether it's mission or dialogue or whatever. The more you can think this through before you try and recruit, the easier it'll be. You'll need to work out your own aims and rationale for the events you run. The thinking behind the Faith and Young People events can be found on our aims of Faith and Young People page, our Ethos page, or the pages where we discuss Issues
Make It Appealing
You might think that a day to discuss comparative religion and eschatology is what all young people are waiting for. However our experience is that most are looking for something a little bit more dynamic. Our basic principle is that we combine the best of youth work practice with the best of dialogue practice. But we never forget that we are doing youth work first and foremost. So make sure your day has elements in it that are going to attract young people. These can also be things that build on your aims for the day.
Big or Small?
It can be really tempting to think that this issue is so important and exciting that it'd be great to get everyone together for a mega-event, and these can be great. Our experience, having run a few of those, is that whilst they can create a buzz and excitement they are much, much harder to recruit for. More significantly, all the feedback we've had from several events is that the smaller events have a bigger impact on the young people who come along. Even if you break a big group down into smaller groups, the impact seems to be greater at smaller events. We now tend to run events where one church group meets up with one school, each bringing maybe six young people. Not only does this help with recruitment but it also helps to ensure that you get equal numbers of Christians and Muslims (see the next paragraph).
Creating a Safe Space
For many young people, meeting people of a different faith can be an intimidating experience if they are unused to it. They can be anxious that they'll be asked difficult questions or have to participate in activities that compromise their own faith. One of the key factors of a Youth Encounter event is the creation of a "safe space". This is a space which everyone comes to as an equal and discovers that their needs are catered for as fully as everyone else's, and where they can avoid confrontation if they want to.
Some young people are at school with people of different faiths and are used to discussing (or arguing) about their beliefs. For some that environment feels anything but safe. Part of the reason for creating a safe space is to provide a place where they can come and learn how to speak about their faith and in order to equip them better for the rough and tumble of discussion at school.
There are a number of elements required to create a safe space and they are all linked by the concept of equality: creating a space where everyone is equal.
Venue
A safe space will be one where everyone is a visitor. As appealing as it might be to ask a Christian group to visit your mosque or a Muslim group to come to your church, immediately it is not a meeting of equals. One group are the hosts and the others are visitors. One group is in familiar surroundings, the others are in new and possibly confusing surroundings. When you visit someone for the first time you are (hopefully) on your best behaviour and need to find your way round their home.
You don't meet on equal terms. Well it's the same with this encounter lark, so meeting as equals will probably mean meeting at a venue where everyone is a visitor. This will therefore be neither a mosque nor a church but a hall that can be hired from a third party. We recently got two groups together in the function room of a balti restaurant which made a great venue and meant we could share a meal together at the end.
Food
Lots of people ask why we don't have a session where we all bring our favourite food along to share. After all, eating together is a tried and tested way of building friendships (unless you're Lucrezia Borgia!). The trouble with bringing and sharing food is that it's very hard to maintain equality. What happens if a Christian turns up with a bacon sandwich, as it's quite legitimately his favourite food? Either he has to be told in advance that he can't bring it as pork is haram (forbidden) for Muslims, therefore they can't eat it. Or he brings it and the Muslims are unable to join with him in sharing something he enjoys.
Either way it's unequal and people, potentially, feel awkward and "unsafe". Or a Muslim brings a chicken curry (sorry for the rather stereotyped food, but I'm only trying to make a point about equality) made with halal meat. This is meat which has been killed according to Islamic law, and at the killing of the animal a prayer is said. Some Christians would see this as being equivalent to eating food sacrificed to idols which some Christians are unhappy about. So again people feel awkward and "unsafe".
Our solution has usually been to get folk to arrange their own food if we're meeting over a mealtime. In reality this means that all the leaders head to the local baker's whilst the young people all end up in McDonald's together ordering a variety of meat, fish or vegetarian meals.
When we met in the balti restaurant we ate together and had a choice of a meat dish, using halal meat, or vegetarian, which everyone seemed happy with.
Music
Should you play background music as folk are arriving at an event? My natural inclination is always to have music playing to create a good atmosphere (usually something uplifting by New Order). However, apart from the challenge of finding music that everyone will at least sort-of like, some Muslims consider all music to be haram (forbidden), so to have any playing is offensive. Others don't mind or enjoy music.
Some advice I was given by a Muslim friend is that music with a very distinct beat is liable to be more problematic for Muslims than more ambient music. This does mean you might find yourself welcoming folk to an event with the Celtic strains of Enya in the background, or you may know of other more contemporary ambient music that you could use. As with many of these issues it's worth checking out beforehand, if possible, what people's views are to help you get it right.
Prayer
Muslims have set times of day when they need to pray, and it's important to make sure that these are catered for in your meetings. However it's also important to make provision for Christians to pray together. In our experience when this doesn't happen the Christians can feel left out and that their spiritual needs have not been considered as carefully as those of the Muslims.
At a couple of events we've had the prayer at different times and invited members of the other faith to observe the prayer and worship if they want to.
Although some folk found being observed uncomfortable, for many people seeing others at worship gave a new and deeper understanding of them and their faith.
Should We All Pray Together?
We don't at our events as for some people this crosses a line into multi-faith worship which they feel uncomfortable with. Our experience is that many young people come willing to meet others but wanting to remain very close and faithful to their own faith. What we have done is to have a time of silence where people can pray as they want to. This might be to thank God for food that's coming up or to commit the day to him. This, we've found, takes the fact that we're meeting as people of faith seriously but also takes seriously the notion of the "safe space" where the young people feel safe to pray in a way which doesn't compromise themselves or their faith.
Programme Ideas
We always try to have a mix of good youth-friendly activities, input to help the young people think through the issues of the day, activities that help them to process and present what they've learnt, and some good fun.
Follow these links for programme ideas based on events we've run in the past (open in new windows).
Activities
Part of our aim at Youth Encounter is to find new models of doing dialogue, models that engage with teenagers. Some of the activities that we've tried are below but experiment with other, better ones.
Signature Bingo
An oldie but a goodie. Everyone has a sheet like the one linked to below and they have to go round and get people to sign things that they've done or like. Each person can only sign a sheet once. Give a prize to the person who gets their sheet completed first. It's a very non-threatening ice-breaker to have at the start of the session and get folk talking and mixing.
We have provided a Signature bingo
sheet which you can download for use. Some of the categories might be dated or irrelevant for your group, so do alter it as necessary.
Team Challenges
Split the group into teams, mixed Muslim and Christian, and set them a challenge that has to be done in a certain time. For example: build the tallest tower out of newspaper and sellotape (or out of dry spaghetti and blu-tac for a somewhat messier alternative). This is another good way of breaking down barriers. By being task-orientated it gives a shared goal which the young people can focus on. It also develops a team spirit based around that group, not the group the young people came to the event with.
Ten Pin Bowling
A chance to unwind and relax together. It's a good activity as it's fun, simple to organise and there's space and time for people to chat. We always get the young people into mixed teams. However, what often happens is that during the course of the game they drift back to chat to the friends they came with.
Mapping Exercise
This works best if the young people are from roughly the same area. Stay in separate Muslim and Christian groups and give each group a very large simple map of the area. Use flip chart paper or wallpaper and just draw on the main roads and one or two landmarks, the place you're meeting, the school etc. Then encourage the young people to add significant landmarks, eg where you live, where friends and family live, where you hang out at the weekend, where you shop, where's the best takeaway, where you go to worship.
Then compare the maps and discuss similarities and differences between them. You can revisit the maps (either in the same groups or different) and add on things such as where you feel safe, where you'd never go, which areas you like, which you want to see improved, what other facilities you'd like to see in the area.
Interviews
Get the young people into pairs, a Muslim with a Christian, and give them a series of interview questions that help them understand each other. Have a mixture of factual (eg how many sisters do you have?), opinion (which TV programme would you like to ban?), faith based (what's the best thing about being a Christian or a Muslim?) and lifestyle (what would you normally be doing now?).
This is another good way to help the young people start talking in a non-threatening way and to discover similarities and differences with the person they're talking to. This activity usually takes AT LEAST 20 minutes as once the talking gets going it's very hard to stop.
To give you some ideas here is an Interview sheet
which we've used before.
Discussing Faith
We've found that in order to help the young people discuss matters of faith they need some input to get the discussion started. This can either be from the activities they've done already (such as describing their area) or through a talk.
When we have people giving talks for the young people we have certain criteria we are looking for.
- Have a Christian and a Muslim speaker.
- Being a good communicator with young people is more important than being a big name or an expert on the topic you're looking at.
- Give them a time limit for their talk (15 mins max) and make sure they stick to it.
- Give them a clear brief of what to say, and make sure they understand the aims and ethos of the event. This is not a chance for them either to lecture their own young people or to try to convert the others.
Getting the Discussion Going
After the initial input we've sometimes put people into separate faith groups so they can first of all think about whether they agreed with the speaker from their faith, or whether there are things they'd want to say or add. We then mix the groups up and give each faith group a chance to add their voice to what the speaker said. We then start to provide space for questions and comparisons.
Discussing the Issues
To make sure the discussion flows and stays on track we provide a set of questions for the groups to use. We also make sure the groups have a copy of the Guidelines for Dialogue which they work to (you can download this from the panel at the top of this page). In the past we have had adult leaders of the groups but have found that the groups work better when they are led by a young person. To help the groups keep going we have one or two adult leaders moving round and intervening briefly when needed.
The groups should have a clear reason for discussing the issues, maybe because they are going to use what comes out of the discussions in a presentation they will give at the end of the day. This helps give a focus and stops the groups from straying too widely from the aims of the event.
Using Adults Present
One of the curious things about these events is that a lot of youth leaders or other interested adults find them really interesting and want to be involved. This can be great in terms of running the day (do make sure you go through all the necessary child protection and CRB checks with your helpers) but we've found it can hinder discussions between the young people. At one of the first events we ran we had adults in the discussions with young people. At one point I went round and in every group the adults were talking and the young people were listening not what we had planned, so be careful about how and when adults are involved.