e-mailed in by a youth worker:
I have a question for you. I’m doing Young Life. We have the school is about 15 percent minority, and Young Life is about 40 percent minority. The problem is that the 40 percent of the minority kids are really hood, the type that throw balls during the talk and are on cell phones and what not!
I know they come because I’m a leader, but I feel like it’s stopping from being most effective in the school, because most of the 85 percent of the white kids are afraid to come to club. I love the people I lead with, but I don’t want to make them ineffective. Do you have any advice?
I’ve been wondering if stepping down is the answer, or maybe starting a Young Life group with just those kids!
I know they come because I’m a leader
You have a great opportunity here. I used to work at a youth center in Los Angeles, and the kids who were the most distruptive and threatening to the other kids were drawn to me because I held them to a higher level of responsibility. Well, I took the 5 kids who other staff saw as troubling, made a “covenant” with them to meet weekly (we called it a Covenant Group- and we met for 3 years). And those kids who were even at odds with each other began living like brothers and my expectations of them allowed them to rise to those expectations. You have the opportunity because of who you ARE, and I think starting something which is with just these kids would be a great opportunity for you and them.
I always realized that my kids in my youth groups always connected more quickly with leaders or volunteers who had the same ethnic makeup as them and I think in this way you can use this to your advantage for the Kingdom.
But that’s just a white boy’s take. Hopefully others can pipe in and add some depth to this conversation.