Email: Alex Creager

Friends,

Our youth group at Whitehouse has done a lot this year. They have helped lead a couple of our Sunday services, did a fantastic job with our Christmas Eve play, and even prepared a Seder (Passover meal) experience for Maundy Thursday. We’ve had movie nights with them, parties at homes, and a lock-in. We’ve taken them to youth rallies, bowling, pizza, and even a wild-west-themed church weekend. I’ve seen them grow together tremendously through our Sunday nights and Youth Alpha. But the past few weeks have been my favorite all year with them.

Since the beginning of May, we have been running a program for our youth on Sunday nights called “Preparing Youth to be Peacemakers.” It is a program of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland that teaches youth about—and deals directly with—the sectarian violence and conflict in Northern Ireland and Belfast.

Every week the program gets our youth to talk about how the conflict between Protestant/ Catholic, Loyalist/Republican, has affected their lives, and what impact they can have on it. One week the youth talked about where they lived and what their neighborhoods were like. It was encouraging for me to hear that many of them live in mixed neighborhoods and have Catholic and Protestant neighbors. They also spoke about different housing estates where they would never go. What surprised me was that even though all our youth are Protestant there are Protestant housing estates they won’t go into because they know those areas are full of violence.

One week we got them to realize that we all have stereotypes of others by playing a word game. I would read out a word like “teacher,” “redhead,” “Muslim,” or “Irish,” and they would have to immediately write down the first word they thought of. I think many of our youth were surprised at how mean some of the things they wrote down were. That same day we broke up into groups and they shared their own stories about growing up here. A couple of the girls talked about being stuck at a youth rally at a church in a Protestant housing estate because riots broke out throughout the neighborhood. Another youth told the story of her cousin getting murdered at a bar because he was friends with a Catholic. I’ve known these kids the whole year and never knew they’ve had such terrible things happen in their lives.

We then got the youth to discuss what part they thought Christians should be playing in the conflict here. Most of them argued that working for peace was something all Christians should be doing, and you could see that for a lot of them it was something personal. They saw it as a challenge for themselves to be different, to not be divided, to get along and make friends with people who are different from them.

Last week we had a Catholic guest speak to us about what being Catholic means to him. He was a guy in his twenties who is now going to start seminary to become a priest. It was fantastic to see a young passionate Catholic breaking down the stereotypes most people have about Catholics. He explained how the rosary helped him focus on prayer, how their services had almost the same exact elements in it as a Protestant service, and how the tradition and history of the church helped him feel more connected to the original disciples. One youth asked him if Catholic and Christian were different. This may sound like a strange question, but many people refuse to call Catholics Christians. He answered that he considers himself Christian before Catholic, that Catholics share the same faith in Jesus Christ, and that Protestants and Catholics all are a part of the same body. I think he broke down a lot of incorrect views about Catholics, and the kids went away from it realizing how much we share with Catholics.

Throughout these weeks the kids have opened up much more than I expected, and they’ve seen what part they can play in the future of Northern Ireland. A lot of them have talked about how glad they are that they live in a mixed neighborhood or go to an integrated school. I thought many of them would think that the Troubles were before their time and don’t have an impact on their lives. Instead, each one has talked about how the Troubles have impacted their lives. I know this course is for the youth and I’m supposed to be one of the people leading it, but every week I leave feeling that I’ve gotten more out of it than I possibly could have taught the youth.

Alex

P.S. I'd be very pleased if you visited my blog.