Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work: A Theological Vision for the Church's Work with Young People 3030966909, 9783030966904

Citation preview

Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work

A Theological Vision for the Church’s Work with Young People Phoebe Hill

Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work “This important and powerful text engages you from the first line as the author invites you to share her bag of crisps in the rain and her theological vision for young people who find home and belonging in a Christian-run youth club in an inner city. Hill has effectively connected theological and philosophical theory with the lived experiences of young people. It is both rigorous and highly accessible— and fills a gap for a theological text grounded in empirical research and youth work practice. This is a crucial text for those working with young people in Christian youth work and ministry. For those of us in academia, it is a strong example of how to bring disciplines together as well as how to apply philosophical and theological inquiry to practice-based research.” —Naomi Thompson, Senior Lecturer in Youth and Community Work, Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of Young People and Church Since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion “Phoebe Hill is a fresh new voice in the debates around the Church and Young People. In this book she brings a theological sophistication to the idea of ‘home’ as a central concern of youth ministry. She does this however out of a deep and gritty engagement with practice. When theology and ministry experience come together like this the result is a must read for anyone concerned about the future of the Church.” —Pete Ward, Professor of Practical Theology, Durham University, UK, and Professor of Practical Theology NLA University College, Norway

Phoebe Hill

Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work A Theological Vision for the Church’s Work with Young People

Phoebe Hill Youthscape Luton, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-96689-8    ISBN 978-3-030-96690-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Eden—may you always feel at home

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you must firstly go to the wonderful people at Palgrave Macmillan, who took a chance on this book and agreed that it was worth writing. Thanks particularly to Phil Getz who began the process, and to Arun Prasath who saw it through to completion. Thank you to the copy editors and others behind the scenes who made the book so much better than it would have been. The book began with a PhD thesis, which was guided, shaped, and encouraged along the way by my exceptional supervisors at King’s College London: Dr Susannah Ticciati and Dr Tania de St Croix. Your academic rigour, insights, and wisdom—along with genuine care, thoughtfulness, and timely kind words—sustained me through my PhD and made this research what it is. Thank you both for going above and beyond your roles, particularly in the strange hinterland of life-after-PhD. Thanks too to my thesis examiners, Dr Naomi Thompson and Dr Alison Milbank, whose comments shaped my ongoing thinking and whose encouragement that ‘this could be a book’ gave me the gumption to pursue publication. The original research was generously funded by a Professor Sir Richard Trainor Scholarship at King’s College London, without which it would not have been possible. I am so grateful for the insightful feedback from Dr Andrew Root and Martin Saunders who read an early manuscript of the book. I asked you not to tell me if it was awful and you kindly obliged.

vii

viii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are simply not enough words to thank Josh, my husband and love of my life. Bridget Jones once said that sometimes you love a person not because they are like you, but because they feel like home. Thank you for being my home. Last, but by no means least, thank you to all of the brilliant youth leaders and young people who were part of this research (you know who you are). This is your story and I hope that I have done you proud.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Why a Theological Vision for the Church’s Work with Young People?   4 Introducing the Youth Hub   9 Introducing Heidegger and Bonhoeffer  11 A Final Note  17 References  19 2 Robbie: No Place Like Home 21 Finding Home: The Plight of Today’s World  25 Having a Home but Not Being at Home  33 Conclusion  39 References  40 3 Michael: The Youth Club Home 43 The Environment  48 Language  52 Practices  54 Relationships  55 Experience  59 Heidegger: Home and Being Human  61 Conclusion  64 References  65

ix

x 

Contents

4 Jonas: Home and Homelessness 67 Attachment  69 Technology  75 Home and Homelessness  80 Conclusion  84 References  85 5 Shahid: A Christian Home 87 Raising Christian Consciousness  90 A Christian Habitus  94 The Living Space of the Church  98 Conclusion 102 References 103 6 Miriam: A Penultimate Home105 Revisiting Heidegger 108 Bonhoeffer and Boundary 111 Reading Bonhoeffer Through a Heideggerian Lens 114 A Penultimate Home 116 Conclusion 121 References 123 7 Charlotte: A New Vision for Christian Hospitality to Young People125 The Power Dynamics of Hospitality 128 Boundary and Home: A Theological Perspective 132 Power and Hospitality at the Drop-in 136 The Conditionality of the Church’s Work with Young People 140 Conclusion 141 References 143 8 Conclusion: Finding Home145 The Benefits of Home as a Theological Framework 150 Bringing It Home 156 9 Postscript: Beyond Youth Work159 Broader Youth Contexts 161 Christian Parenting, Fostering, and Adoption 163

 Contents 

xi

Work with the Homeless 165 Work with Migrants and Refugees 167 References 168 Appendix169 Index173

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Walking back from town to the youth centre, I am doing my best to shelter my packet of crisps from the torrential rain. It feels colder than it has done in a long while, and I am walking as fast as my short legs will carry me. Glancing up from under my scarf, which is placed over my head for protection, I spot 17-year-old Aleksander1 sitting in a doorway. He doesn’t have a coat, and his hair looks wet through. He is staring into space, holding an energy drink in a blue plastic bag. He must have finished college already today. I wave at him. He waves back. ‘Hello, Happy New Year!’ I shout through the rain. ‘Hiya’, he says back. ‘How are you?’ I ask. ‘Good’ he replies. I ask if he is waiting for the youth club to open. He says yes. I look at my phone—it’s 2pm. It doesn’t open until 3:30. I stand there awkwardly, not knowing what to do. I offer him a crisp, which he politely declines. ‘Ok then, see you later on’, I say, feebly. ‘Bye’, he replies, waving me off.

It is not unusual to find young people sat outside or near to the Youth Hub building long before it opens. I have grown accustomed to the doof doof doof on the glass front door at 3:30 p.m. on the dot, where young 1

 All names used are pseudonyms.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_1

1

2 

P. HILL

people are waiting, eager and impatient to come in. I have even seen young people sit outside the building when it is closed. They either like it here or have nowhere else to go. Possibly both. Although the youth club feels casual—with young people coming and going, drinking milkshakes, playing games, and eating dinner together— there is nothing casual about their relationship with it. In some cases, it is the only place they go to other than their homes. It is the source of their significant relationships and the structure for their day. The club is an important place for many of the young people, described by them as a ‘home’. This book is all about this home, and what it might mean to become at home at a youth club. It reflects on the fact that home can be found in a myriad of different places and is not the exclusive prerogative of family domains. The book makes one central claim: that finding home may be the spiritual quest of life in the twentyfirst century. The Church therefore has an important role in enabling young people to become at home with themselves, with others, in the world and with God. The book’s argument has six key stages. The first of these is that being at home in the world may be harder than ever before. The youth club is urban, it is diverse, and it is complicated. The conversations and interactions are gritty and real, and the young people who attend the club have faced and overcome many hard things. The young people I met had various different home realities: some were in care, some were refugees or asylum seekers, and some were carers for their critically ill parents. Some of the young people did not seem to feel at home at home. Exploring multiple different sociological, geographical, political, environmental, and technological factors, a picture will be painted of why homelessness may well be the plight of our time. Secondly, the young people and youth workers at this particular Christian youth club have created a home together. The basis for this book, and for all of the subsequent philosophical and theological reflection, is the finding that the youth workers and young people have found a home at the youth club. In a context where divides across class, race, ethnicity, and religion are rife, this youth centre is bucking the trend. It has managed to create a place of welcome, a place of togetherness, and a home for young people from many different walks of life. Despite the significance of this home to the young people, it is important to emphasise that the youth club home, like any home, is a complex reality. It is not as simple as saying that an individual is either at

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

home or not at home. Home can be experienced in multiple different places, and young people at the club demonstrated a complex mix of at-­ homeness and alienation in all of their home locations. Home is also not an unquestionably positive reality, and the powerful way in which our homes shape us can lead to both good and bad outcomes in our lives. A Christian youth club home can also be theologically complex, as young people defy the simplistic categories we seek to put them into. Where such a home is carefully curated to ensure flourishing, Christians creating home with young people is theologically charged action. Bringing together the thinking of Martin Heidegger and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theology of home is constructed and a case made for why the Church creating home with young people is important Christian action in the world. This action is not only important if it leads to some other intended aim, namely, young people becoming Christians. Neither is this home necessarily a good in and of itself. Rather, a middle way is paved between the two, establishing a connection between the homes we make on Earth and our capacity to become at home with God. In order to create home in this way and offer authentic hospitality to young people, the Church must be willing to let go of power, agenda, and control over the outcomes of its work. As shall be argued, there may be many motivations at play when it comes to the Church’s work with young people. Not all of these are for the good of young people, or arising from a genuine desire to be with them. Unlike other forms of Christian activity in the world, there are often conditions placed on young people in order to be welcomed by the Church. We need a broader vision for what the Church’s work with young people could be and look like, something this book seeks to address. Finally, the framework of home offers a theological vision for the Church’s work with young people. Christian youth work that ventures beyond the four walls of a church building finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place, critiqued in the youth work literature for being unethical for harbouring a secret conversionist agenda and in the youth ministry literature for being ineffective at making young people Christians. Creating home with young people presents a theological vision that is confidently Christian, devoid of deception, and goes beyond the outcome-based measurement of young people becoming Christians. It is not the answer but one theological answer to the conundrum of Christian youth work.

4 

P. HILL

Why a Theological Vision for the Church’s Work with Young People? Before launching into the research itself, it is important to address the elephant in the room: why a theological vision for the Church’s work with young people? Why is such a vision necessary in the first place? When it comes to Christian youth work, it is fair to say that we are having a bit of an identity crisis. It is not always easy to articulate the aims and objectives of Church youth work, and what it is trying to do. The Church’s work with young people can incorporate a wide range of activities, including common provisions like Sunday School groups, mid-week Bible studies, or youth groups, all the way to schools’ work, mentoring, mental health groups, community youth clubs, or detached youth work. When I talk about the Church’s work with young people in this book, I therefore include this vast array of different activities and indeed all projects that Christians might run with and for young people—whether funded and overseen by a particular church or as part of the Church more broadly through parachurch organisations. Given the diversity of different contexts and various forms of youth work that Christians may end up doing with young people, it is challenging to articulate one common aim or objective that sits well with each of these disparate activities. For some youth ministry thinkers, there is really only one rightful aim for all of the Church’s work with young people: sharing the gospel. For example, Ashton and Moon write: ‘Christ does not teach us to support the personal development of young people so that they may realise their full potential. […] The first aim of Christian youth work must be to present a young person with the claims of Jesus Christ.’2 Similarly, Pete Ward explains: ‘We do youth work as Christians for no other reason than that we tell the gospel story. We may wish to frame our practice in terms of educational theory, counselling, community work, sport and leisure provision, […] but to do so as Christian youth workers is to seek to integrate these perspectives into the overarching nature of the larger gospel story.’3 Finally, Steve Griffiths argues that youth ministry is first and foremost a spiritual ministry and that ‘the primary calling of a Christian youth worker is to know the will of the Father and to model his or her ministry on that  Ashton, Mark and Phil Moon. 1995. Christian Youth Work. Crowborough: Monarch. 20.  Ward, Pete. 1997.Youthwork and the Mission of God: Frameworks for Relational Outreach. London: SPCK. 27. 2 3

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

of Jesus Christ’.4 Each of these authors contends that although the Church’s work with young people may have other benefits, the overall aim must be sharing faith. The challenge comes when this aim is translated into an objective or measurement through which church youth work is assessed. Where the gospel story is not being shared with young people, or perhaps more concretely, where the impact of this is not realised through tangible ends such as young people becoming Christians or attending church, such provisions are rendered ineffective or unsuccessful. Building on the National Study of Youth and Religion in America, Kenda Creasy Dean concludes that although ‘youth groups do important things for teenagers, providing moral formation, learned competencies and social and organisational ties […] they seem less effective as catalysts for consequential faith’.5 In the largest and most significant study of UK community-based Christian youth work projects, Collins-Mayo, Mayo, Nash, and Cocksworth reach a similar conclusion regarding the effectiveness of these groups at transmitting the Christian narrative. Their research involved interviews with 300 young people across 34 different youth clubs, and although the young people were aware of the Christian ethos of the project, [a]ttempts to raise Christian consciousness, such as might be considered integral to a Christian missional approach, ended up as quite subtle and often completely missed by the young people. The hope was that the young people would ask questions of the youth worker’s faith. The reality of a memoryless generation was that for the majority of young people this would rarely happen, if at all.6

The Christian youth workers in the projects were careful not to impose their Christian faith on the young people and conversations around faith therefore tended to affirm what the young people already knew and believed. Collins-Mayo et al. argue that in these instances, the Christian youth workers employed a ‘strategic liberalism’ which elevated the

4  Griffiths, Steve. 2013. Models for Youth Ministry: Learning from the Life of Christ. London: SPCK. 11. 5  Dean, Kenda Creasy. 2004. Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 11. 6  Collins-Mayo, Sylvia, and Bob Mayo, Sally Nash, and Christopher Cocksworth. 2010. The Faith of Generation Y. London: Church House Publishing. 23.

6 

P. HILL

promotion of personal choice above the telling of the Christian story.7 The authors conclude that although Christian youth work has proved successful at building relationships, it is less effective at providing young people with an understanding of the Christian narrative. It is questionable, however, whether or not the aims of youth ministry translate directly onto other forms of youth work carried out by Christians. Although faith transmission may be an appropriate objective in a church youth group, it may not be an appropriate sole objective for other contexts. As Naomi Thompson identifies, it may be unfair to expect faith transmission in a community youth club-style setting.8 To evaluate a provision based solely on this aim may mean that the important work happening with and for young people in these spaces is missed. More than this, if settings such as community youth clubs, run by Christians, exist solely to pass on faith to young people, then there are question marks over the ethics of such a set-up. Allan Clyne highlights that such projects can ultimately be deceptive, if they pretend to be one thing while actually being another.9 If the youth club is simply a façade for a hidden conversionist agenda, and exists solely to transition young people into church or to create the opportunity for faith conversations, then such a project is ethically questionable. In such cases the youth club is instrumentalised for the wider purposes of the church’s youth work and becomes a means to another end rather than an important provision in and of itself.10 The answer to these challenges is to develop a broader vision for the aims of our work with young people. Yes, we may wish to share faith with young people, but where this becomes the sole aim for all of the Church’s work with young people—in diverse contexts such as schools, mentoring relationships, mental health groups, youth clubs, and so on—the challenges above emerge. Developing a broader vision is particularly important, as highlighted, where Christians move beyond the four walls of the church. It is here that Christians can lose confidence in their work with young people, forced to get by with only a fuzzy sense of what they are  Collins-Mayo et al. Faith of Generation Y. 95.  Thompson, Naomi. 2018. Young People and Church since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion London; New York: Routledge. 119. 9  Clyne, Allan. 2015. Uncovering Youth Ministry’s Professional Narrative. Youth and Policy 115:19–42. 10  Andrew Root identifies this as the danger of a ‘third thing’ approach to ministry, see Root, Andrew. 2007. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press. 117. 7 8

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

trying to do. Without a compelling case for why such work is important and theologically significant, they may well end up retreating back into the church’s walls, sticking to safer, clearer, youth ministry-style groups. As a case in point, after concluding that the community youth clubs they studied were ineffective at achieving the aim of raising Christian consciousness, Collins-Mayo et al. ask ‘why the Church invests in such work at all’11. This book exists to challenge this thinking and offer a compelling theological case for why the Church should invest in such work. As we start to unpick the underlying motivations for why the Church seeks to do youth work, there may also be other subtle motives at play. The first ulterior motive is anxiety. Large-scale studies chart the decline in numbers of young people attending churches in the UK.12 The picture in this country when it comes to the Church’s engagement with young people is bleak, a reality which may only be accelerated by the forced cessation of youth work during the coronavirus pandemic. The decline narrative around young people and Church can lead to anxiety, something Mark Yaconelli identifies as a common motivator within Western Christianity and its approach to working with young people.13 Anxiety may provoke us into action, but it will only get us so far, and is not a solid foundation for our work with young people. The second ulterior motive, connected to the first, is a numbers-driven approach. To alleviate the anxiety and guilt we may feel about young people, we want to see young people in church. The classic phrase ‘bums on seats’ captures this desire among the wider Church body to see numbers of young people coming through its doors. We employ youth workers in order to make this reality happen and to attract young people to attend. If a youth worker is unsuccessful at this, we may begin to evaluate on an economic level the effectiveness of their work and whether the church is seeing a return on its investment. This could be described as a technological approach to youth work,14 focusing on tangible and quantitative measurement to assess its success, which may ultimately lead to divesting in such provisions if they do not result in numbers of young people in attendance.  Faith of Generation Y. 25.  For example, Brierley, Peter. 2005. Pulling out of the Nose Dive. London: Christian Research. 13  Yaconelli, Mark. 2006. Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practising the Presence of Jesus with Young People. London: SPCK. 14  See Root, Andrew. 2014. Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic. 4–6. 11 12

8 

P. HILL

The third and final ulterior motive is an internal one. Through her analysis of the Sunday School movement, which was arguably the first form of Christian youth work in the UK, Naomi Thompson charts the shift towards an institutional agenda in the Church’s work with young people.15 Where historically Sunday Schools were established for the purpose of providing education to working children on their day off, in the mid-nineteenth century Sunday Schools connected up with churches, shifting in their objectives towards faith transmission. It was this shift and institutionalisation that brought about the downfall and decline of the movement, and therefore rather than being a passive victim of decline, Thompson argues that the Church was instrumental in it. Such an institutional agenda may still be at play in the Church’s work with young people today. As we look to the future, and as congregations grow older and diminish as congregants pass on with no one to replace them, there is talk of young people being ‘the future of the Church’. To put it bluntly, in this equation young people are needed in order to ensure the survival of the Church going forwards and to keep the ship afloat, financially and practically. Recruitment therefore flows from an institutional motive, rather than a recognition that young people are to be welcomed and considered important for who they are today. Not one of these ulterior motives prioritises young people themselves or what might be best for them. Neither do they flow from a genuine desire to be with young people. Granted, no church or individual would base their ministries on any of the above or adopt these motivators deliberately. Rather, they are likely to lurk somewhere under the surface, mixed in with other, worthier aims. However, we must be careful to analyse why it is that we do youth work as Christians. This is where a theological vision comes in: we need a compelling theological vision for our work with young people that places young people at the centre, focusing on what might benefit them. We need to let go of our own agendas in order to embrace young people as they are, acknowledging the other motivations and aims at play and asking whether or not they are appropriate for the contexts in which we are working. More than anything, we need a generous approach to our work with young people, not seeking to satisfy our own aims and objectives but genuinely desiring to be with them on their own terms; this book offers one theological vision and way forward.

 Thompson. Young People and the Church Since 1900.

15

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

Introducing the Youth Hub To begin to formulate this theological vision, the first stage in my research was to spend time at a Christian youth work organisation, getting to know the leaders and young people and finding out why they engaged with the project. The chosen location for my fieldwork was the Youth Hub (pseudonym), a Christian youth work centre located in an urban and multicultural city in the UK. Launched originally as a local church-based outreach ministry, the Youth Hub has changed dramatically since it began. The scope of the Youth Hub’s work today is broad, running projects in the areas of emotional, social, and spiritual wellbeing and working with a wide range of young people through targeted and open access projects: with young people in schools who are at risk of exclusion, with children in care, with asylum seekers and refugees, with young people who are at risk of harming themselves, and with young people on the fringes of gangs. As a consequence of its wide reach, it comes into contact with hundreds of young people on a weekly basis, through schools’ work, mentoring, group work, church work, short-term projects, and the daily after-school drop­in, a number that is continually growing. The Youth Hub is a parachurch organisation run by Christians and connected with a network of churches in the city, but not affiliated with a particular church or denomination. The Youth Hub’s growth has been organic and reactive over the years that it has existed, taking in other projects when they have needed homes and responding to the needs of young people, schools, and churches as they have presented themselves. The blend of activities offered to young people at the Youth Hub, and the emphasis on holistic care in addition to the desire to talk about and pass on Christian faith, makes it an example of a Christian youth work project that sits in the third space between youth work and ministry, and Christian work with young people beyond the four walls of the church. It is therefore also an example of a project facing the challenges around the aims of Christian youth work highlighted above, having outgrown the theological ‘boot’ it began its life with. Like other similar projects, it is in need of new theological paradigms to draw connections between the different elements of its provision and to give a sense of conviction that its work is meaningful Christian action. Within the Youth Hub, one project stood out as particularly interesting: the daily drop-in. Running Monday to Friday after school, the drop­in is an open access provision for young people, meaning that any young person—regardless of their needs, interests, or position in society—can

10 

P. HILL

access it.16 Young people are free to come and go at the drop-in, arriving and leaving when they like and participating in as much or as little as they want to. Although the staff organise activities for each evening, from CV help to a weekly dinner to faith activities, the drop-in is largely just a space for young people to hang out with their friends, chat to the leaders, and play FIFA on the Play Station. The stereotypical picture of Christian youth ministry is of a group of white middle-class high-achieving young people in the suburbs; the drop-in is worlds away from this. Life at the drop-in can feel frenetic and disjointed, punctuated by half conversations and fragments of interactions in the midst of the perpetual comings and goings of different young people. Many of the young people who attend the drop-in have extremely challenging lives, for various different reasons, all of which spills over into their time at the Youth Hub: friendship or family problems, low educational attainment, truanting and running away from home, self-­ harm or mental health problems, drug use, involvement with gangs, frequent interactions with the police, violence, and bullying. For some of the young people, the drop-in is the only provision they are connected to; they have fallen through the net of other services or have felt unable to access them (e.g. CAMHS,17 social services, school, or college). In the midst of all of this, the drop-in is perceived to be a safe place to socialise with others, to relax, and to have fun. The book is littered throughout with stories from the drop-in centre, along with interview extracts from my conversations with the young people and youth workers. The research carried out at the Youth Hub was an ethnographic study, which included participant observation, interviews, and archive research. The aim of ethnography, which is realised through narrative and story, is to capture the culture of a particular location. In my case, the culture under study was the Youth Hub—and the drop-in specifically—as I sought to understand the distinctive practices, relationships, language, and goings-on of this place. I spent 20 months with the Youth Hub, beginning with an intensive phase of hanging out with young people at the drop-in every day for four months. Through this, my hope was to unearth what was meaningful about the project to the young people and youth workers who were part of it and how they articulated and made sense of this meaning. 16  This is Robertson’s definition, see Robertson, Sue. 2005. Youth Clubs: Association, Participation, Friendship and Fun!. Lyme Regis: Russell House. 17  Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service.

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

The narrative extracts included in the book are taken directly from fieldnotes written during the drop-in sessions, and the details are reported as closely as possible to what I witnessed in the scene. The only exceptions to this are where names and information have been changed in order to protect identities. Although I have sought to protect the validity of the stories through staying close to the fieldnotes, offering what might be called a realist ethnographic account,18 this does not somehow make the stories objective or neutral; as a researcher, my background, beliefs, and life experiences shape how I interpret what is happening, and like all ethnographic accounts it is therefore a subjective account of what I experienced in the drop-in space. The stories are also confessional in tone, highlighting my feelings as a researcher in the space and my reactions to what is going on around me. To analyse my findings at the drop-in, and to begin to carry out the constructive theological work, I coded the notes from my fieldwork diary, ethnographic journal, interview transcripts, and archive documents and employed grounded theory to identify the key themes and home framework. All participants in the study were recruited through a process of informed consent, and overall the research involved 34 staff and volunteers, and 24 young people from the Youth Hub; for more information on the research participants and methodology, see the Appendix.

Introducing Heidegger and Bonhoeffer To interpret the findings at the drop-in and offer a theological perspective, the book employs the thinking of two main interlocutors: Martin Heidegger and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These two scholars are not natural companions nor are they necessarily the obvious choice for such a study. Politically, they could not be more different: Heidegger was sympathetic to the Nazis, while Bonhoeffer was actively involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. However, they were contemporaries in Germany in the twentieth century, and one of Bonhoeffer’s works—Act and Being—is written largely in response to, and building on, Heidegger’s Being and Time. Indeed, Bonhoeffer was deemed to be a ‘Heidegger man’ by one of

18  See Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.

12 

P. HILL

his professors,19 and there are resonances of Heidegger’s thinking in various aspects of his work.20 There was therefore familiarity, interest, and respect in at least one direction between them, even if Bonhoeffer ultimately concluded that Heidegger’s thinking could not be adapted for theology,21 a claim which others refute.22 Despite not being a natural ally for a theological project in Bonhoeffer’s eyes, Heidegger wrote extensively about home and homelessness throughout his life. Heidegger’s corpus of work is often divided into the ‘early’ and ‘late’ Heidegger,23 owing to the stark contrast in style and content of his texts. His most significant early work, Being and Time, is notoriously complex, and his technical use of language renders it, in some cases, relatively un-translatable from Heidegger’s native German; the most prominent example of this is Dasein—Heidegger’s term for the sorts of being that human beings are—which can be translated in several different ways: ‘being-there’,24 ‘there-being’,25 ‘Here I am!’26—to name a few. Although home and homelessness are referenced only in passing in Being and Time, Heidegger’s early thinking already gives priority to the idea of human

19  Bethge, Eberhard. 1970. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary. Ed. E.  H. Robertson. Trans. E.  Mosbacher, P. and B.  Ross, F.  Clarke and W.  Glen-Doepel. London: Collins. 94. 20  See DeJonge, Michael. 2012. God’s Being Is in Time: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Appropriation of Heidegger. Beiträge zur Dietrich Bonhoeffer-Forschung. Eds. C. J. Green, K. B. Nielsen, C. Tietz. 21  Bonhoeffer concludes that despite Heidegger’s ‘enormous expansion’ of philosophy, he ultimately offers a ‘consciously atheistic philosophy of finitude’, with Dasein’s structure fundamentally closed in as a being-towards-death. Dasein can know itself from within itself according to Heidegger’s account, which leaves no room for revelation (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2009. Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology (DBWE 2). Eds. W.  W. Floyd and H-R.  Reuter. Trans. M.  H. Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 72–73.) 22  See, for example, Atkins, Zohar. 2018. An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity: Unframing Existence. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 23  Also known as ‘The Other Heidegger’, see Dallmayr, Fred. 1993. The Other Heidegger. New York: Cornell University Press. 24  Wollan, Gjermund. 2003. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Space and Place. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift—Norwegian Journal of Geography 57, 1: 31–39. 25  Sherman, Glen. 2009. Martin Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity: A Philosophical Contribution to Student Affairs Theory. Journal of College and Character 10: 7. 26  Kisiel, Theodore. 2010. Towards the Topology of Dasein. In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Ed. Thomas Sheehan. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 95–106.

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

‘situatedness’.27 After Being and Time, Heidegger’s writing is sporadic and fragmented with an altogether different tone, appearing in the form of lectures, speeches, and letters to various different audiences. This difference in tone leads some to question whether or not these later works are even philosophy at all, as they read more like pieces of poetry, mysticism, or literature. It is in these later works that home becomes the central theme, owing to Heidegger’s increasing concern that homelessness may well be the plight of the modern age. Unlike Heidegger, Bonhoeffer is not known for writing about home, and nothing has been published on this theme.28 I will therefore pause longer here with Bonhoeffer, to highlight the ways in which he discusses the topic of home in every period of his working life. Alongside completing his first thesis—Sanctorum Communio—in 1927, Bonhoeffer journeyed to Barcelona for a year to work as a parish church assistant, delivering a wide range of sermons. In these early sermons, often geared towards children, Bonhoeffer uses the allegory of home to explain the fall, salvation, and eschatological hope for the community of believers. Bonhoeffer relates the world to a big house with everyone having the same father.29 He writes, ‘The Lord God had just barely shown the first people their rooms, had let them enjoy themselves, had given them everything that they wanted, and then one day they all ran out of the house and wanted to try to live on their own’.30 Eventually the father of the house sends his own son to tell the people about him and remind them what it is like ‘at home’. The son, Bonhoeffer explains, ‘took these children by the hand

27   Malpas, Jeff. 2006. Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press. 65. 28  Bonhoeffer’s family life is highlighted in biographies but I have found no sustained exploration of his writing on home. 29  Bonhoeffer’s language and understanding of gender roles is, at times, troubling. In addition to his understanding of God as father here, he elsewhere provides a particular perspective on the woman’s role within the home that is uncomfortable for modern readers (see Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Ed. J. W. de Gruchy. Trans. I. Best, L. E. Dahill, R. Krauss and N. Lukens Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 84–85). For this reason, I have chosen to focus on Bonhoeffer’s use of home specifically for my theological construction, rather than his discussion of family life. 30  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2002. The Young Bonhoeffer, 1918–1927 (DBWE 9). Eds. C. J. Green., P. D. Matheny, and M. D. Johnson. Trans. M. C. Nebelsick and D. W. Scott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 458.

14 

P. HILL

and showed them the correct path, which they were not able to find alone. […] Crying in sorrow and in joy, they all went into the radiant house.’31 The connection between home and eschatological hope continues in his sermon on Psalm 62:2, delivered to the congregation in 1928, where he describes the church community as ‘a people that assembles and unites day after day, night after night, a people on a sojourn to its home, a home shimmering and shining in the far distance’.32 Similarly, the sermon on Matthew 5:8 delivered in the same year acknowledges that to see God is ‘to behold our home after wandering our whole life long, to throw ourselves on God’s bosom and weep and rejoice the way a child does in its mother’s arms’.33 These sermons depict an eschatological and ecstatic reunion between God and his people when they finally arrive at the heavenly home they have longed for. Moving into the writings of the early 1930s, there is a shift in Bonhoeffer’s description of home. No longer simply a future, eschatological hope, home becomes a now and not-yet reality experienced through faith in Christ. In Bonhoeffer’s second thesis Act and Being, completed in 1929–1930, he writes: ‘The one who became an adult in exile and misery becomes a child at home. Home is the community of Christ, always “future”, present “in faith” because we are the children of the future.’34 Although home remains a future reality, it is received, in some way, by the children of God in the present. The nature of this now and not-yet reality is most interestingly expressed in a sermon on Colossians 3:1–4 given later the same year, where Bonhoeffer writes that ‘[o]ur life is hidden with Christ in God. […] We ourselves are already at home in the midst of our homelessness.’35 Bonhoeffer elsewhere locates this now and not-yet home specifically in the church community, asserting that it is here that ‘you should find God and your brother, should find your home, should have the promised land’.36 Bonhoeffer is keen to emphasise that talk of a  The Young Bonhoeffer. 461.  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2008. Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931 (DBWE 10). Ed. C. J. Green. Trans. D. W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 507. 33  Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931. 515. 34  Bonhoeffer. Act and Being. 161. 35  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2012. Theological Education Underground, 1937–1940 (DBWE 15). Ed. V. J. Barnett. Trans. C.  D. Bergmann, P.  Frick and S.  A. Moore. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 464. 36  Theological Education Underground. 432. 31 32

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

­ eavenly home should not lead the Christian to escapism; the children of h God are called to persevere in the midst of the world as they wait, persisting on despite their homesickness and longing to be at home with God.37 From 1933 to the end of the decade, Bonhoeffer frequently describes the Christian as a foreigner and stranger on the Earth. In a sermon delivered in London on the wisdom texts, Bonhoeffer chose to include the following short poem, or prayer: Jesus has called us children of the resurrection. Homesick children, that is what we are when all is as it should be with us. Then through this life of dangers I onward take my way; But in this land of strangers I do not think to stay. Still forward on the road I fare That leads me to my home. My Father’s comfort waits me there, When I have overcome. Amen.38

While on this Earth, the community of believers experience homesickness, journeying towards their future home and making up a ‘colony’ in a foreign land. Bonhoeffer explains that, ‘Although as foreigners, as a colony they do indeed participate in the same earth, in the same earthly laws of life, this earth does not belong to them; they are not as much at home there as are the natives.’39 The church community therefore possesses the gifts of the Earth in a different way to the world: as a foreigner. On a similar vein, in Discipleship, Bonhoeffer describes the church community as a colony of strangers far away from home and a community who must rely on the hospitality of the land in which they live.40 Towards the end of his life, in the years of involvement with the conspiracy against Hitler and eventual imprisonment, Bonhoeffer reflects on the importance of home and how his own home life shaped him. In a  Act and Being. 291.  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2007. London, 1933–1935 (DBWE 13). Ed. K.  W. Clements. Trans I. Best. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 336. 39  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2011. Theological Education at Finkenwalde, 1935–1937 (DBWE 14). Eds. H. G. Barker and M. Brocker. Trans. D. W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 472. 40  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2003. Discipleship (DBWE 4). Eds. J. D. Godsey and G. B. Kelly. Trans. B. Green and R. Krauss. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 250. 37 38

16 

P. HILL

letter penned from inside Tegel Prison, Bonhoeffer credits his own familial home with having formed a significant part of himself.41 Throughout his fiction writings from this period, all of which feature the relationships between a middle-class educated family bearing many similarities to his own, Bonhoeffer applauds the way that a good home can give a ‘quiet strength’ to those who belong to it.42 These late texts are tinged with nostalgia as he thinks of family and friends whom he may never see again, and the treasured forests and holiday homes of his childhood. He relates home to a kingdom of its own in the midst of the world, a refuge, and a sanctuary in which happiness may dwell.43 Bonhoeffer describes the earthly home as a reflection, or the start, of the heavenly one: ‘The earthly community is but a first beginning of the eternal community, the earthly home an image of the eternal home, the earthly family a reflection of God’s fatherhood over all human beings, who are children before him.’44 Facing his own imminent death, it is perhaps surprising that the major topic of his last writings is home, rather than the pressing issues of politics, the future, the state of the world, or war. It seems that in the face of these challenges, the significance of a good home can, for Bonhoeffer, not be underestimated; he writes, ‘In the coming years of upheaval, it will be the greatest of gifts to know that you are safe and in a good home. It will be a bulwark against all dangers from within and without.’45 This whistle-stop tour through Bonhoeffer’s works has sought to demonstrate that Bonhoeffer did write about home and was interested in the theme, even if it was not a central focus of his theology. For the unconvinced, there are other reasons why Bonhoeffer presents a helpful theological counterpart to Heidegger for the purposes of this project. The first of these is that Bonhoeffer is already known to the youth ministry community through the work of leading theologian Andrew Root. Root has pioneered theological discussion of youth ministry and has charted a course in which others—like myself—are now able to follow. This book builds on the significant body of work Root has already done in the field 41  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2010. Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE 8). Ed. V. J. Barnett. Trans. I. Best, L. E. Dahill, R. Krauss, N. Lukens, B. Rumscheidt and M. H. Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 78–79. 42  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2010. Fiction from Tegel Prison (DBWE 7). Ed. C.  J. Green. Trans. N. Lukens. Minneapolis: Fortress. 64. 43  Bonhoeffer. Letters and Papers from Prison. 85. 44  Letters and Papers from Prison. 87. 45  385.

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

and is heavily indebted to him, along with others. Rather than a detriment, revisiting Bonhoeffer from a different perspective is therefore offered as a positive contribution to the work that already exists. The second is that Bonhoeffer’s theological methodology resonates with the approach of contextual theology; as Frits de Lange articulates, ‘Bonhoeffer always did theology “at the given place”—be it in the church, the university, or in prison—and at every specific spot he tried to understand God’s concrete reality and to respond to it appropriately’.46 There is an essential integration in Bonhoeffer’s work between the theoretical and the practical, something which bodes well for a practical theology seeking to do the same. The third and final reason is that Bonhoeffer offers a helpful theological counterpart to Heidegger, and the two—as I hope to show—can be productively brought together to construct a theology of home. As already emphasised, Heidegger and Bonhoeffer would not necessarily wish to be slotted together in a study such as this. My intention, however, is to bring them into fruitful dialogue, rather than obey their wishes at every turn. Although seeking to be faithful to the texts and interpret them carefully and accurately, I have employed their thinking creatively and constructively, in ways, perhaps, that they would not intend. This is not a book about Heidegger, or a book about Bonhoeffer. It is a book that offers a theological vision for the Church’s work with young people, with the help of some philosophical and theological friends along the way. It is therefore rightly considered a theological appropriation of both Heidegger and Bonhoeffer, drawing on these thinkers as theological resources to meet this end. Building on Heidegger and Bonhoeffer in this way is also not to be taken as a blanket endorsement of all of their philosophical and theological thinking; the aspects included have been cherry-picked for their resonance, relevance, and application to the findings at the Youth Hub.

A Final Note Broadly speaking, the book is divided into two halves. The first half explores the empirical reality of finding home in the world today, both globally and locally in relation to the youth club studied, with the help of Heidegger to interpret and analyse the findings. The second half shifts to 46  de Lange, Frits. 2007. Against Escapism: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Contribution to Public Theology. In Christian in Public Aims, Methodologies, and Issues in Public Theology, Ed. L Hansen, 141–152. Stellenbosch: SUN Press. 148.

18 

P. HILL

Heidegger

Chapter Two What is the case? Chapter Three Chapter Four Why is this the case?

Bonhoeffer

Chapter Five Chapter Six

What should be the case?

Chapter Seven What should we do? Fig. 1.1  The structure of the book visualised

focus on Bonhoeffer, building on the empirical work to present a theological case for why Christians should make home with young people and why it might be an important part of the Church’s work in our time. It also discusses what might be holding the Church back from a genuine form of hospitality to young people. The six chapters address the four key questions of practical theology, as outlined by Richard Osmer: what is the case, why is this the case, what should be the case, and what should we do about it.47 This book is a work of practical theology, weaving together the empirical findings at the youth club with theological reflection (Fig. 1.1). The final and perhaps most important question is: why does this matter? We have seen that in the midst of decline, the Church is growing increasingly irrelevant to the world of young people. The Church has retreated to the sidelines of their lives and many simply have no contact with any form of church at all. In a culture of fear about the future, and anxiety for young people, we can end up retreating to what we’ve always done, focusing on keeping the few who remain. Where the impact of provisions like community youth clubs feels uncertain, or the work feels too costly or too complicated, the Church may simply cease investing in it. This is not the future that I want to see. We have to be brave, Church, and capture a big and bold vision for the future of our work with young people. My intention in writing this book is to offer one theological vision for the future of the Church’s work with young people, making a case for why creating home with young people may be more important than ever before. 47  Osmer, Richard. 2008. Practical Theology. Grand Rapids, Michigan; Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans publishing company.

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

References Ashton, Mark, and Phil Moon. 1995. Christian Youth Work. Crowborough: Monarch. Atkins, Zohar. 2018. An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity: Unframing Existence. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Bethge, Eberhard. 1970. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary. Ed. E.  H. Robertson. Trans. E.  Mosbacher, P. and B.  Ross, F.  Clarke and W. Glen-Doepel. London: Collins. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2002. The Young Bonhoeffer, 1918–1927 (DBWE 9). Eds. C. J. Green., P. D. Matheny, and M. D. Johnson. Trans. M. C. Nebelsick and D. W. Scott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2003. Discipleship (DBWE 4). Eds. J. D. Godsey and G. B. Kelly. Trans. B. Green and R. Krauss. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2007. London, 1933–1935 (DBWE 13). Ed. K.  W. Clements. Trans I. Best. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2008. Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931 (DBWE 10). Ed. C. J. Green. Trans. D. W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2009. Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology (DBWE 2). Eds. W.  W. Floyd and H-R.  Reuter. Trans. M. H. Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2010a. Fiction from Tegel Prison (DBWE 7). Ed. C.  J. Green. Trans. N. Lukens. Minneapolis: Fortress. ———. 2010b. Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE 8). Ed. V.  J. Barnett. Trans. I.  Best, L.  E. Dahill, R.  Krauss, N.  Lukens, B.  Rumscheidt and M. H. Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2011. Theological Education at Finkenwalde, 1935–1937 (DBWE 14). Eds. H.  G. Barker and M.  Brocker. Trans. D.  W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2012. Theological Education Underground, 1937–1940 (DBWE 15). Ed. V. J. Barnett. Trans. C. D. Bergmann, P. Frick and S. A. Moore. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Brierley, Peter. 2005. Pulling out of the Nose Dive. London: Christian Research. Clyne, Allan. 2015. Uncovering Youth Ministry’s Professional Narrative. Youth and Policy 115: 19–42. Collins-Mayo, Sylvia, Bob Mayo, Sally Nash, and Christopher Cocksworth. 2010. The Faith of Generation Y. London: Church House Publishing. Dallmayr, Fred. 1993. The Other Heidegger. New York: Cornell University Press. de Lange, Frits. 2007. Against Escapism: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Contribution to Public Theology. In Christian in Public Aims, Methodologies, and Issues in Public Theology, ed. L. Hansen, 141–152. Stellenbosch: SUN Press. Dean, Kenda Creasy. 2004. Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

20 

P. HILL

DeJonge, Michael. 2012. God’s Being Is in Time: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Appropriation of Heidegger. Beiträge zur Dietrich Bonhoeffer-Forschung. Eds. C. J. Green, K. B. Nielsen, C. Tietz. Griffiths, Steve. 2013. Models for Youth Ministry: Learning from the Life of Christ. London: SPCK. Kisiel, Theodore. 2010. Towards the Topology of Dasein. In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, 95–106. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Malpas, Jeff. 2006. Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Osmer, Richard. 2008. Practical Theology. Grand Rapids, Michigan; Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans publishing company. Robertson, Sue. 2005. Youth Clubs: Association, Participation, Friendship and Fun! Lyme Regis: Russell House. Root, Andrew. 2007. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. ———. 2014. Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic. Sherman, Glen. 2009. Martin Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity: A Philosophical Contribution to Student Affairs Theory. Journal of College and Character 10: 7. Thompson, Naomi. 2018. Young People and Church since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion. London; New York: Routledge. Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Ward, Pete. 1997. Youthwork and the Mission of God: Frameworks for Relational Outreach. London: SPCK. Wollan, Gjermund. 2003. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Space and Place. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography 57 (1): 31–39. Yaconelli, Mark. 2006. Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practising the Presence of Jesus with Young People. London: SPCK.

CHAPTER 2

Robbie: No Place Like Home

17-year-old Robbie is perched on top of the middle island in the kitchen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without his thick grey coat on, buttoned up to the top. The large headphones around his neck almost cover his entire head because of the hunched position he is in. We say ‘hi’ to each other. I start making a cup of tea, and offer youth work volunteer Mark one too. A young guy comes into my peripheral vision, opening up the large drawer containing cutlery and cooking utensils. He begins to inspect the knives, testing how sharp they are. I feel suddenly relieved that we lock away the sharp knives as a safety precaution. The boy leaves the drawer hanging open, so I close it behind him. I haven’t seen him before. Walking through to the quiet room after handing Mark his tea, I find Robbie now slumped on the sofa. I ask him how he is. ‘Dying’, he replies. Asking what he means, he explains that he has had a nasty flu bug for a week or so. ‘I really hope my uncle gets it’, he says, ‘because he is a DICK’ [he mouths the word ‘Dick’]. I want to ask more questions but just nod, and say: ‘Oh, yeah, ok’. Pausing for a moment, I ask him, ‘Do you live with your uncle?’ He nods his head. Charlotte walks in, throws her bag on a chair, and says she is gutted that she won’t have her normal mentoring session on Friday as it’s a bank holiday. ‘I always feel better after mentoring’, she says.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_2

21

22 

P. HILL

Robbie pipes up, ‘Sorry, but what’s the point of mentoring? Because you know, people come here to socialise and then they get pulled upstairs—the same with CAMHS1—are you’s lot even trained…?’ I try to explain, weakly, that it isn’t quite the same as CAMHS, and that it’s a bit more informal than that. ‘My CAMHS worker didn’t wanna see me no more’, Charlotte adds, laughing. ‘Yeah me too!’, Robbie responds, leaning forwards and smiling, ‘They just said, “I’m afraid Robbie we can’t help you no more” [In a mock posh accent]. I’m fucked!’ Charlotte continues laughing as she walks off to the kitchen. Robbie leans back into the sofa. ‘I just help myself and help others, that’s what I’ve been doing for years’, he says, under his breath.

Robbie keeps himself to himself. He slips in and out of the drop-in unnoticed, sometimes spending long portions of the evening sitting alone. He is always wearing his characteristic high-necked jacket and headphone combination like a coat of armour. I did not get to know Robbie well over the course of the fieldwork period; I am not sure if anyone at the Youth Hub really does. Robbie finds it difficult to trust people at the drop-in, approaching the activities, conversations, and socialising with caution. I overheard him remark to another young person that it is easier not having or needing any friends; he is not one to let people in. Robbie also evidently has a complicated home situation, living with an uncle he describes as a ‘dick’. It is possible that he comes to the youth club to get away from home. Robbie’s family home has not proved itself a positive place to be and he may not feel ‘at home’ at home. Robbie was not the only young person with a complicated home relationship. On one evening at the drop-in, I discovered just how many of the young people had challenging relationships with at least one of their parents. Charlotte and I were chatting in the dining room, when she began to doodle on her arm. Her friend Luke joined us, and a group of young people arrived asking for Charlotte and Luke to draw tattoos on their arms. It became like a mini tattoo parlour, as we each took it in turns to be adorned. One tattoo in particular, a historic drawing by Charlotte, garnered attention from the young people: it said the words ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ on it, embellished with a large rose. One of the young people  Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service.

1

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

23

requested the tattoo with ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ on, but asked to have it without the ‘dad’. Charlotte replied that she would have it without the ‘mum’, remarking that her mum is ‘dead’ to her. Luke said he would have it without the dad, because he does not really have a dad. Another young person said which of the two parents they would have, and on and on it went, round the circle of young people gathered. Each of the young people had one parent to leave out and struggled to think of who they might put in the second spot. I was struck by how complicated these young people’s family relationships were, either due to a dysfunctional relationship (there were lots of words like ‘prick’ used) or due to an absent one. None of the young people wanted both ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ on their tattoo. Many were from single-parent homes or seemed to have a negative relationship with at least one of their parents. According to a survey carried out by the Youth Hub staff, the young people said that the second biggest reason why they came to the drop-in, after seeing people, was to ‘get away from home’.2 Asking any teenager about their relationship with their parents might elicit a negative response. These relationships, however, seem to be particularly challenging. Home, for some of these young people, is, at least sometimes, a place ‘to get away from’, a place of conflict and strife. Ritchie and Ord found a similar sentiment in their study of an open access youth work project, with young people saying they attended the club in order to get out of their house and away from their families.3 Others have highlighted the challenging nature of young people’s home backgrounds and the need to acknowledge the wider institutional influences at work in their lives.4 The difficult social worlds these young people inhabit spill over into their time at the drop-in, sometimes extending to their friendships and peer relationships. The threat of physical harm to others is never far away, and much of the work at the drop-in involves resolving conflicts between young people, preventing fights, and mediating between young people and their friends (and sometimes, between young people and their parents). The drop-in world is one of physical threats, violence, misunderstandings, and subsequent make-ups. 2  The staff at the Youth Hub carried out a survey in Summer 2017 of the young people who attended the drop-in, to discover why they came and what they liked about it. 3  Ritchie, Daisy and Jon Ord. 2016. The Experience of Open Access Youth Work: the Voice of Young People. Journal of Youth Studies 20: 3. 4  See Davies, Bernard. 1976. Part-Time Youth Work in an Industrial Community. Leicester: National Youth Agency.

24 

P. HILL

Despite this, the young people appreciated the environment at the drop-in and articulated a difference in their experience of the Youth Hub compared with their familial homes. In my interview with Charlotte, she used the term ‘safety’ to capture this difference: Phoebe: Do you prefer being here than being at home? Charlotte: Yeah. Like here I feel more open to speak to people, and I feel safe coming here, and staying here. And like when I go home—Nah. Phoebe: [Pause] You don’t feel safe at home? Charlotte: No. Not really. Charlotte explained that she felt safe at the drop-in and yet does not feel safe in her familial home. As Thompson, Russell and Simmons found in their ethnographic research of NEET (not in education, employment, or training) young people, although many teens spend the majority of their time at their place of residence, they ‘do not necessarily regard it as their home’.5 The authors explain that creating home requires resources that may not be accessible or available to young people, such as consistency, money, or emotional security.6 In Charlotte’s case, the resource unavailable to her in her place of residence is the feeling of safety, something she has found at the drop-in. Difficult relationships were not the only factor in the young people’s complicated home lives. One young person I met had emigrated with their parents from Belarus and expressed feeling disconnected from their wider family back home. Another was in the care system and lived alone in supported accommodation. Another moved back to the UK from Iran with his mother, while the rest of his immediate family remained there. Another was a refugee, travelling to the UK alone, now residing in the care system. Another was a young carer for her mum until she died, now living by herself. The young people at the Youth Hub represent a wide range of family and home experiences and histories, each of which presents unique challenges.

5  Thompson, Ron, Lisa Russell, and Robin Simmons. 2014. Space, Place and Social Exclusion: An Ethnographic Study of Young People Outside Education and Employment. Journal of Youth Studies 17: 1. 72. 6  Thompson, Russell and Simmons. Space, Place and Social Exclusion. 72.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

25

Finding Home: The Plight of Today’s World The young people at the drop-in are a microcosm of the global picture when it comes to home. The youth club is situated in an ethnically diverse town, a landing spot for many migrants travelling into the UK; the population of the drop-in therefore reflects its wider context. How the young people at the drop-in find and understand home is caught up with multiple global factors in which they are enmeshed. These global factors contesting our ability to find home will be explored, followed by factors distinctive to the UK context. This is not intended to be a comprehensive summary, but rather a short outline of the factors most relevant to this book on finding home with young people in a Christian youth work setting. These sociological, geographical, political, environmental, and technological trends present a daunting picture of why young people may find it harder than ever before to be and become at home in the twenty-first century. The Loss of Home Thinking about home may conjure different images and feelings for each of us. For some, a person or group of people will come to mind. For others, the term may evoke a particular feeling or sense of security, stability, or safety. It may bring to mind a particular meal or a particular activity. And for many, it will remind us of locations and places where we have been at home, such as our childhood homes or current family residences. We will imagine the walls and the doors, the rooms and the furniture that situated and surrounded our lives at home. For many young people growing up in the UK today, having a safe and stable family home is not a given. Over the last decade, the UK has seen a 53 per cent increase in family breakdown.7 In 2017 the majority of 10–19 year-olds were living with married parents, while 9 per cent lived with cohabiting parents and 23 per cent with single parents.8 Longitudinal studies have shown that the health and wellbeing outcomes for young 7  Benson, Harry. 2015. The Cost to Britain’s Children of the Trend Away from Marriage. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/MF-paper-Cost-oftrend-­away-from-marriage-v1.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 8  Hagell, Ann, and Rakhee Shah. 2019. Key Data on Young People 2019: Latest Information and Statistics. https://www.youngpeopleshealth.org.uk/wpcontent/ uploads/2019/09/AYPH_KDYP2019_FullVersion.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 32.

26 

P. HILL

people in single-parent families are worse than for those in two-parent families.9 The last decade has also seen a 28 per cent increase in the numbers of children and young people going into the care of social services. The majority of looked-after children are aged ten or above, and the proportion of older children in care continues to rise.10 Given that the majority of the population of asylum seekers worldwide are under 18, the last few years have seen increasing numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in England.11 In 2018, they made up 6 per cent of the population of children in care.12 Another challenge faced by families in the UK is unstable housing. Many families find themselves living in temporary accommodation due to poverty or housing problems,13 and with rising house prices the prospect of owning a house has become a pipe dream for many. This leaves families susceptible to the fluctuations of the rental market and the whims of landlords. In 2019, 121,000 young people (16–24) found themselves homeless or at risk of homelessness, with common factors including family breakdown, domestic violence, leaving the care system, or being a refugee.14 Instability of all kinds—whether economic, familial, or residential— are associated with poor outcomes for children. As we face a possible recession emerging from the coronavirus pandemic and unprecedented rates of unemployment, it is likely that levels of instability will increase, hitting low-income families the hardest. 9   Lessof, Carli, Andy Ross, Richard Brind, Emily Bell, and Sarah Newton. 2016. Longitudinal Study of Young People in England Cohort 2: Health and Wellbeing at Wave 2. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/599871/LSYPE2_w2-research_report.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 60. 10   Department for Education. 2018. Children Looked after in England (Including Adoption), Year Ending 31 March 2018. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/757922/Children_looked_after_ in_England_2018_Text_revised.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 11  Refugee Council. 2019. Children in the Asylum System. https://www.refugeecouncil. org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Children-in-the-Asylum-System-May-2019.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 12  Department for Education. Children Looked after in England (Including Adoption). 9. 13   Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. 2018. Housing: Experimental Statistical Release. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/764301/Statutory_Homelessness_ Statistical_Release_April_-­_June_2018.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 14  CentrePoint. 2019. The Youth Homelessness Databank. https://centrepoint.org.uk/ databank/. Accessed 16 July 2021.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

27

Despite the instability of their home lives, many of the young people— like Robbie—would not show up on the statistics above. The vast majority do not have situations ‘bad’ enough to make it onto these statistics. And yet their lives are extremely challenging, often unstable, and often result in them falling through the cracks of other services. It is too simplistic to say that all young people are struggling at home; this is simply not the case. The Good Childhood Report in 2019 found that 10–15s were happiest overall with their families and less happy with friends and school.15 However, it is possible that young people with positive family relationships feel less desire to attend youth work provisions like the drop-in or attend for different reasons such as meeting up with friends, as they have less of a need to ‘get away from home’. For those like Robbie, and Charlotte, however, and the percentage of young people for whom home is an incredibly difficult place to be, the drop-in plays a profoundly important role. The Loss of Homeland It is fair to say that we live in uncertain times. Recent decades have seen mass movement across the globe, as war, environmental catastrophes, and poverty have forced millions from their homelands. According to the 2020 Worldwide Migration Report from the United Nations, the last two-­year period alone has seen major migration and displacement events as a consequence of conflict, extreme violence, or severe economic and political instability.16 The war in Ukraine has provoked an unprecedented exodus of people fleeing the violence, and millions journeying to other European countries. The patterns of migration are not consistent across the world, but largely follow migration ‘corridors’ from developing countries to those with larger economies.17 The numbers of migrants continue to increase year on year, with an estimated 272 million globally, nearly double the figure in 2000.18 Although this represents only 3.5 per cent of the world’s population, these figures already surpass those projected for the year 2050.19 Displacement is not a new phenomenon. Willie Jennings, among others, points to colonialism as the beginning of wide-scale global displacement, a historical moment that we are still seeing—and for many, 15  The Children’s Society. 2019. Good Childhood Report. https://www.childrenssociety. org.uk/good-childhood. Accessed 16 July 2021. 16  International Organization for Migration. 2020. World Migration Report. https:// www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 17  International Organization for Migration. World Migration Report. 2. 18  World Migration Report. 3. 19  World Migration Report. 2.

28 

P. HILL

suffering—the consequences of. In The Christian Imagination, Jennings argues that colonialism brought about a separation of people and land, removing space and place as the living organiser of identity. Native peoples have always lived with an intimate connection to the land, but, as Jennings highlights, the era of conquest and colonisation began to change this relationship.20 Land was perceived by Europeans as space to conquer, divide up, and sell, and in their actions the colonial Christians reconfigured life.21 Living in harmony with the land is a fundamental factor in being at home, and living on the Earth as our home. Without the facilitation of identity provided by land, bodies began to be viewed according to a racial scale, from black to white. The significance of the colonial displacement of people from land cannot be overstated. Everything, Jennings writes, from peoples to the ground to the sky ‘was subject to change, subjects for change, subjected to change’.22 All of life, and Christian missional work, now lives in the shadow of the colonial moment and we must be aware of the implicit narratives and imbalances of power that underpin the Church’s work both historically and presently. Interestingly, the only solution for Jennings is to recapture what Heidegger called ‘the way of dwelling’, something we shall return to in the next section. These factors shape the lives of young people at the drop-in, to varying degrees. Many of the young people I spoke to had migrated to the UK with their immediate family or in some cases alone. Some arrived in the UK with little or no English and have had to navigate life and the education system while learning the language. They have been disadvantaged by having to manage in a foreign tongue, in foreign systems, and with the foreignness of family on top of the normal challenges of being a teenager. To live as a non-native shapes how an individual experiences home and whether or not they feel at home in their country of residence. There is also—as with many urban Christian youth work projects—an unspoken and often unrecognised dynamic at play at the Youth Hub: the racial diversity of the young people is not reflected among the youth workers, as the majority of the employed staff are white British. Given what Jennings highlights above and the racial discrepancy between these two groups at the drop-in, it is crucial to take seriously the power dynamics of the project, a topic which will be the focus of Chap. 7. 20  Jennings, Willie James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press. 39. 21  Jennings. The Christian Imagination. 42. 22  Jennings. 43.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

29

The Loss of Earth as Home In 2015, I was involved with conducting a survey of teenagers to find out what they wanted to talk about at church.23 Among the top entries were mental health, relationships, poverty, and social justice; at the time, climate change was nowhere to be seen. It is hard to imagine, just a few years on, that the same would be true today. Climate change exploded onto the radar of teenager’s lives through the powerful example of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. What began as a solo school strike for the climate in 2018 became a worldwide movement involving millions of young people. In a powerful speech given at Davos, Thunberg urged leaders to take climate change seriously, saying: ‘I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.’24 The notion of the Earth as our home became emblazoned across the protest signs of teenagers around the world, with ‘save our only home’ and ‘it’s our home, it’s our only future’ echoing this sentiment. The sense of impending threat to our only home is a momentous burden for young people to carry. Today’s teens are fearful—perhaps understandably—about the future of the Earth and the world that is our home. Another school strike for climate protest sign read: ‘I am too young to be facing an existential crisis’. Many young people feel that where their parents’ generation had enjoyed a peaceful and prosperous life, their own future looks bleak. According to a report from Barnado’s in 2019, 67 per cent of young people felt that their lives will be worse off than their parents.25 There is also a sense of anger towards previous generations and the careless way in which they have tended and cared for the Earth. A similar study from The Children’s Society found that one in three teens have concerns over whether they will have enough money in the future26 and are increasingly concerned about climate change.

23  Youthscape. 2016. Losing Heart: How Churches Have Lost Confidence in Their Work With Children and Young People. https://www.youthscape.co.uk/research/publications/ losing-heart. Accessed 16 July 2021. 24  Thunberg, Greta. 2019. ‘Our House Is on Fire’, Davos Speech. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-gretathunberg16-­urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate. Accessed 16 July 2021. 25  Smith, Lianne. 2019. Overcoming the Poverty of Hope. Barnado’s. https://www.barnardos.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/Barnardo%27s%20new%20report%20-%20 Overcoming%20poverty%20of%20hope.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 26  The Children’s Society. Good Childhood Report. 2019.

30 

P. HILL

These figures have skyrocketed in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic.27 Putting life on pause across the entire planet, the pandemic has brought about unprecedented restrictions to life, education, relationships, travel, jobs, and future prospects. We will no doubt experience the ramifications of the pandemic for many years to come, and it is possible that some industries and ways of life will never recover. It will certainly transform the way that we live, for good or for ill. It is too early to tell what the long-term impact will be for those in their formative years, but the shambolic ways in which school closures, lockdowns, and exam procedures were implemented in the UK will add a further sense of distrust towards the adults of the world and the feeling among young people that their parents’ generation have failed them. The pandemic’s indelible mark may be that life as we know it can be snatched away at any time and that nothing is for certain. Instead of dwelling on the Earth in peace, stability, and security, the exact opposite, for teenagers living right now, seems to be true. The Loss of a Transcendent Home Throughout history, humanity has made sense of its existence in relation to a transcendent beyond, the ultimate horizon that limits and gives meaning to our years on Earth. Over the last few centuries, however, there has been a monumental shift in the way that human beings in the West conceive of themselves and the ultimate meaning of life. Charles Taylor, in his influential tome A Secular Age, charts this journey from the pre-­ enlightenment enchanted universe in which the world was spiritual and magical to the techno-scientific rationality of the post-enlightenment world.28 In the enchanted world of the past the self was ‘porous’, with spiritual forces acting upon an individual and binding or freeing them, and all of nature was imbued with magical, spiritual meaning.29 In our secular age, Taylor explains, the world is no longer an enchanted place—with spiritual beings behind every corner and divine intention behind every

27  See TES reporter. 2020. Most Young People ‘Worried about Coronavirus Impact’. https://www.tes.com/news/most-young-people-worried-about-coronavirus-impact. Accessed 6 August 2021. 28  Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap. 29  Taylor. A Secular Age. 27.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

31

natural event—as the self has become ‘buffered’.30 The world and our very selves are reduced to material objects, with no room for the spiritual. This loss of transcendence and an increasingly secular perspective go hand in hand with a decline across the board in religious affiliation. Researchers have charted the distinctive trends and trajectories of young people’s engagement with religion. Europe has seen consistent decline across all age groups with regards to religiosity, with each younger age group being somewhat less religious than the one before. David Voas describes this decrease as a ‘generational half-life’, drawing on the metaphor of radioactive decay to illustrate the decline in religion from parents to children in each successive generation.31 In the UK, the British Social Attitudes Survey continues to chart a rise in the percentage of young adults who describe themselves as having no religion and who are consistently the least religious age group.32 What has religious affiliation got to do with being at home? In Crossing and Dwelling, Thomas A. Tweed provides a theory of religion that seeks to take into account its many different manifestations, complexities, rituals, beliefs, and institutions. In summary, Tweed suggests that religions are ultimately about making home and crossing boundaries.33 In other words, religions help the pious to find their place in the world and navigate through space. Religions are principally about orientation, enabling us to discover who we are and where we are going. Tweed continues by stating that religion fundamentally involves homemaking, situating followers in the body, the home, the homeland, and the cosmos.34 Religion enables followers to cross boundaries, and even the ultimate horizon of life. Where being religious may have helped previous generations to orient themselves and to find their home in the world, the same cannot be said of today’s teens; if the majority of young people in the UK are now of no religion, then it is no longer helping them find their place or orientation in the world. Where their grandparents or parents may have found their bearings in and through a religious perspective, young people are looking  Taylor. 27.  Voas, David. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. European Sociological Review 25: 2. 32  British Social Attitudes 36. 2018. https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-­ social-­attitudes-36/key-findings.aspx. Accessed 16 July 2021. 33  Tweed, Thomas. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press. 54. 34  Tweed. Crossing and Dwelling. 76. 30 31

32 

P. HILL

to other things for their source of home. The same is true of churches. If, as Alain de Botton suggests, our homes are places that harmonise with our ‘internal song’,35 then churches are singing from a different hymn sheet to young people. Several researchers have charted the decline in numbers of young people attending churches and Christian youth groups in the UK. By 2005, nearly half of churches had no one attending between the ages of 11 and 14, and over half had no one attending between the ages of 15 and 19.36 The Church of England is the denomination hit hardest by decline,37 with recent statistics showing that less than 100,000 young people attend Church of England churches in the UK.38 Churches grow increasingly unconfident in their work with young people, aware that the tried-and-tested models are no longer working and unsure of how to engage young people in the first place.39 There is also an apparent loss of transcendence within religion itself and a shift in the nature of belief among young people where it is present. In the US, Smith and Denton reject the picture painted of young people as restless souls searching endlessly for an authentic expression of faith. What their research found in contrast was that, ‘For most teens, religion is taken as part of the furniture of their lives, not a big deal, just taken for granted as fine the way it is’.40 The researchers coined the phrase ‘Moralistic therapeutic deism’ to describe the nature of this faith among American teens, expressing the predominant feeling that Christianity involves a benignly positive and mostly absent kind of god. In a similar study in the UK, Savage et al. distinguish between what they call ‘formative’ and ‘transformative’ spiritualities.41 Although there was evidence of ‘formative’ spirituality among the young people in the youth groups studied, their research found very little ‘transformative’ spirituality. The authors argue that  de Botton, Alain. 2007. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin. 107.  Brierley, Peter. 2005. Pulling out of the Nose Dive. London: Christian Research. 37  British Social Attitudes 36, 2018. 38  Dale, Jimmy, and Dave Male. 2019. Report for General Synod: Children and Young People. https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2020-01/GS%202161%20 Children%20and%20Youth%20Ministry%20Full%20with%20Appendix%20-%20Final.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. 39  Youthscape. Losing Heart. 2016. 40  Smith, Christian, and Melina L.  Denton. 2005. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 122. 41  Savage, Sara, Bob Mayo, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, and Graham Cray. 2006. Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 15- to 25-Year-Olds. London: Church House. 35 36

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

33

formative spirituality is a less desirable reality than transformative spirituality, which involves a genuine encounter with a transcendent other. The secular perspective also has ramifications for how youth ministry itself is perceived. Building on Taylor, Andrew Root explores the implications of the loss of transcendence for models of faith formation. Root explains that in our secular age, ‘the plausibility of divine action has been eroded, leading us to concede that reality is a flat (transcendence-less) place, unreflectively giving over our understandings of faith to the sociological’.42 Youth ministry has therefore relied too heavily on social scientific analyses, seeking to evaluate empirically what ‘works’ and removing God from the equation entirely. We need to recapture, Root argues, a sense of youth ministry as a theological task in order to counteract the impact of this trend. The loss of transcendence—evident in many different ways and manifestations—is problematic for home. As we shall see in relation to Heidegger, transcendence is fundamental to our ability to dwell on the Earth as our home. It is only when we not only speak to the world, but are ‘spoken to’ by it, that we might truly dwell on the Earth. This is to encounter the world in submission to a transcendent other, not subjectable to our every whim and control. Despite Heidegger’s lack of explicit religious convictions, he is convinced that it is only by recapturing a sense of transcendence that we can learn to dwell once again.

Having a Home but Not Being at Home All of the factors listed thus far present a daunting picture of the challenges facing us in the twenty-first century when it comes to finding our home. Many of these factors are not new; homelessness has always been a problem, as has struggle at home. What is new, Miroslav Volf argues, and is an acutely modern phenomenon, is that the world is our home and yet we do not feel at home in it.43 There is also a fragility to our experience of home that seems to be unique to our time.

42  Root, Andrew. 2017. Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s Obsession with Youthfulness. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. xxi. 43  Volf, Miroslav. The World as God’s Home. Cadbury Lectures, Birmingham University https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/theologyandreligion/events/ cadburylectures/2019/index.aspx. Accessed 9 July 2021.

34 

P. HILL

Although we have a home on the Earth, we do not experience it as our home. There is therefore an important difference between having a home and being at home. There is a qualitative difference between having a physical shelter and having a place where one feels safe, welcome, and loved. Walter Brueggemann describes this more proactive element as ‘homefulness’.44 Having a home is not simply the negation and eradication of homelessness but rather suggests a particular kind of experience, a positive socio-spatial reality that cannot be reduced to bricks and mortar. Here we shall begin our exploration of Heidegger, who is renowned for his phenomenological account of existence. Phenomenology is a movement within philosophy associated with twentieth-century thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-­ Ponty, among others. During the enlightenment, and most significantly the thinking of Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant, the world was divorced from the mind. Descartes’s famous adage ‘I think therefore I am’ placed the onus on human beings as primarily thinking things and questioned the reality of material existence.45 With Kant’s contribution, these moves served to separate the subject from the material world entirely, creating a chasm between our perceptions of reality and reality as it ‘is’. The subject and object were firmly segregated and it became hard to know if we could really know anything at all. It is into this context that the phenomenological movement steps. Phenomenological accounts seek to fuse the subject and object back together, overcoming the dualistic hangover of the philosophical tradition post-Kant. Heidegger’s approach begins by insisting that the human being is inseparable from the world in which it finds itself. Heidegger chose a particular term to capture what it is to be human: Dasein, which means literally ‘being-there’ in German. Human beings are Daseins, as we are located in a particular environment and context: we are beings-in-the-­ world. It therefore does not make sense to separate the subject, human beings, from their environment, the objects around them, as we are always and forever alongside the world, and only discover who we are through the world.

44   Brueggemann, Walter. 2014. The Practice of Homefulness. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books. 45  Descartes, Rene. 1996. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies by Rene Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

35

Heidegger’s understanding of what it is to be human provides important context for getting to grips with a phenomenological understanding of home. According to Heidegger, being-at-home is a way of being-in-­ the-world. It is therefore possible to have a home, but not be-at-home. It is not about having a particular home, but how one experiences being in that home. This is where the global and local factors highlighted above come into sharp relief. Although the Earth is still our home, the climate crisis means that we no longer experience it as our home; we are losing our way of being-in-the-world as our home. Although young people may have a place of residence with a parent or uncle, they may not experience their home as home; they are not-at-home at home. Heidegger articulates this in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, a lecture given to the Darmstadt Symposium on ‘Man and Space’ in 1951. Heidegger draws a distinction between having a home and ‘dwelling’, explaining that ‘the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there’.46 Dwelling (or being-at-home) is not synonymous with having a home for Heidegger; although the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, this is not equivalent to a dwelling place. Dwelling is therefore an additional, richer, and qualitatively different state than having a home. Heidegger entertains that modern buildings may be well designed, cost effective, and attractive, but none of these elements ensure that an individual will find a home in them. Having a house is therefore no guarantee of homeliness, as being at home entails a certain way of experiencing a place. Over the course of his life, Heidegger became increasingly concerned with technology and the way in which it interferes with our ability to be at home in the world. Heidegger argued that modern technology was changing the way that people live. He believed that humanity’s use of technology was ushering in a sinister and homeless way of being and that this, more than anything else, is the plight of the modern age. He writes: ‘Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it’.47 It was not specific technological devices that were perceived as a threat by Heidegger, but rather the ‘essence’ of 46  Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, 239–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 244. 47  Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 3–35. Trans. W. Lovitt. New York; Hagerstown; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row. 4.

36 

P. HILL

technology. Heidegger gives this essence a name: Enframing. Through this Enframing lens, all people and things are viewed as resources for our manipulation and use. They are what Heidegger describes as ‘standing-­ reserve’, awaiting our coercion, manipulation, and control. Humanity is caught in the grip of this technological lens or essence, unable to see the ways that it shapes our thinking and our living. Enframing is like a pair of glasses, through which everything in our surroundings comes to be viewed. The glasses—which we forget that we are wearing—change how we see the objects around us, the people we come into contact with, and even ourselves. Certain things in our vision become distorted through this pair of glasses, while others fade from focus. The world is filtered through these glasses and therefore our perception of things as they really are or should be is warped. The glasses also change how we live, as we do not question the perspective on the world that they give to us. The technological frame is therefore not simply a means to an end, or an instrument, presenting the world to us in a neutral way. Rather, it shapes and restricts how the world appears to us and changes the manner in which the world is revealed to us. The technological perspective of Enframing is therefore a particular kind of attitude or disposition towards the world, one that seeks to control what things may become rather than enabling them to be what they are. It is a posture of domination, with humankind being the measure of all things, rather than a humility before that which is other. Heidegger gives the example of coal, which, rather than being a precious stone or mineral, becomes a resource that we stockpile, ready and awaiting our need of it for fuel and fire. The coal, rather than being what it is, becomes determined by our use of it and manipulated to maximise its usefulness to us. We begin to see all things in the world through this lens of being a resource, according to Heidegger, determining their existence by how we wish to use them. Rather than being independent from us, all things become that which is available for sale by us. The natural extension of this is that we begin to view even ourselves as standing-reserve, as that which can be commodified, used, and sold. In our twenty-first-century landscape, where life is literally ‘enframed’ through a screen, and where manipulating, using, and commodifying images of our lives through social media is commonplace, Heidegger’s thinking and foresight on the essence of technology strikes as significant, if not prophetic.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

37

To live within this technological frame is to live in the world in a homeless way. In contrast to this technological perspective in which we are enmeshed, Heidegger offers another way of living and being: the way of dwelling. To flesh out what it looks like to be at home in the world, Heidegger introduces the concept of the ‘fourfold’, a characteristically cryptic and mysterious aspect of his thought. Heidegger writes: ‘In saving the earth, in receiving the sky, in awaiting the divinities, in initiating mortals, dwelling occurs as the fourfold preservation of the fourfold’.48 These four elements—Earth, sky, divinities, and mortals—are the relations or coordinates within which human beings find themselves in the world. When humanity dwells within the fourfold of Earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, it finds itself restored to these meaningful relations. What is important about Heidegger’s exploration of the fourfold—clearing the way through the poetic language and complicated elements—is this: that humankind is no longer the measure of all things, but stands within a web of relationships and connections, restored to its rightful place. Humanity does not stand at the centre of the universe but is held within a web of interconnectedness, under the sky, on the Earth, before the gods, and among other human beings. Humanity stands humbled before that which is other, that which lives and moves and has its being independently of it. Humanity is ‘spoken to’ by the world, no longer in the position of dominance, coercion, and control but held within the embrace of the four. It is through this shift, and the new posture and attitude adopted, that humanity can find its true home. Heidegger calls this new attitude to the world releasement, or letting-be. It is a posture of surrender to that which is other and an openness to what it may become. It is a gentle way of living in the world, which does not seek to coerce the world and make it into humanity’s own image, but enable it to be what it is. Heidegger talks of safeguarding the world, protecting it from domination, and enabling it to come to presence in freedom and peace. To safeguard is an active endeavour for Heidegger, proactively resisting the onslaught of the technological way. To safeguard the world and everyone in it, we must carve out a space in which individuals can become who they are, protected from the forces that would seek to manipulate and control them. It is here that we see why being-at-home in the world and living in the world through the technological lens of Enframing are opposites for Heidegger: to dwell and be at home in the world we must surrender to it, release it, and allow it to speak  Heidegger. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. 247.

48

38 

P. HILL

to us. It is to acknowledge the transcendence of the world, and that which is other and independent from us. Where Enframing has resulted in a particular orientation towards things—a desire to manipulate and control the Earth—being-at-home enables humanity to let things be in freedom and peace. What has Heidegger’s account of dwelling and technology got to do with young people? The frame that Heidegger describes is something in which we are all enmeshed and therefore don’t necessarily see. We don’t recognise that we are caught in its grips or living by its agenda. The first step is to become aware of the ways in which the technological way of thinking may be influencing aspects of our lives and our work with young people. The danger of not taking Heidegger’s concern seriously is that we extend the technological way of thinking and living into our youth work practice, a practice that will further accentuate the homelessness young people may feel and experience in the world; this will be explored in greater detail in Chap. 4. If our intention and vision is to enable young people to become at home, then we must acknowledge the ways in which our practice may be undermining this. To offer a concrete example, it is possible that, however unintentionally, we fall into the trap of perceiving young people as ‘standing reserve’, as resources awaiting our manipulation and control in the way that we engage with them as Church. As identified in the introduction, there are several non-theological motivators that may underlie our work with young people, including seeing them as the ‘future of the Church’—the ones who will prop up the institution and keep the mission going in years to come. To approach young people in this way is not to perceive them as individual persons, with their own wishes, desires, and interests, but to view them as a resource that we can put on standby, until the time that we need them. To put it crudely, they are like Heidegger’s coal, collected up and stockpiled for a cold winter when they are needed to deliver the sun’s warmth. Even if we acknowledge our need of young people today—say, to bring the Church back to life and inject it with youthful zeal and vigour— we may be susceptible to the same thinking, viewing young people as resources we can use to meet our own ends. This is the technological trap of Enframing, and it is subtle and sinister. Work with young people that emanates from this paradigm will only serve to accentuate the technologisation of life and ministry, further removing young people from the home that they seek and perpetuating a homeless way of living in the world.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

39

Conclusion This chapter has offered a short summary of the complex web of factors contributing to a modern experience of homelessness. The combination of local and global influences in our world today paints a daunting picture and suggests that finding home is under threat. Unable to rely on the traditional ways of finding home, we may have to find and become at home in unusual places and seek out new ways of finding our dwelling. This is exactly what these youth workers and young people at the Youth Hub are doing. And yet even this youth club, and others like it, may soon be a thing of the past. The last decade has seen unprecedented cuts to the statutory youth sector in the UK, all but decimating the youth service as we know it. Many youth clubs up and down the country have been forced to close due to lack of funding, and open youth centres like the drop-in—which have been the mainstay of youth work since the 1960s49—are becoming a thing of the past. The Church therefore has a huge opportunity. The Church is considered to be one of the biggest providers of services to young people in the UK.50 In the midst of cuts to provisions in the statutory sector, the Church is faced with the question of whether or not it will choose to fill the gap, putting its money and resources into creating home with young people. The Church needs to develop a strong conviction of the importance of welcoming and offering hospitality to young people in youth club-style settings. What we shall see in the coming chapters is that young people are already finding novel ways to be at home in the world. They are not victims of their time or circumstance, but feel the loss of such places and are proactively seeking out and creating home in unlikely ways. They are finding and protecting home spaces, like the drop-in, even when the seemingly obvious ones no longer present themselves. These teens, at the forefront of the digital revolution and enmeshed in the local and global factors contributing to modern homelessness, may therefore also be the 49  Youth centres have been a key part of the statutory service in the UK since the Albemarle Report of 1960 (see Muirhead, Adam. 2020. The Albemarle Report, 1960. Youth & Policy. https://www.youthandpolicy.org/articles/the-albemarle-report-1960/. Accessed 22 July 2021). 50  Howell, David, and Paul Fenton. Report of the Consultation: Christian Youth Work and Ministry Across the UK.  Christian Youth Work Consortium. http://www.cte.org.uk/ Publisher/File.aspx?ID=182924. Accessed 22 July 2021.

40 

P. HILL

pioneers of the way home. The next chapter will show how it is that the youth workers and young people at this drop-in are creating home together and what we can learn from their example.

References Benson, Harry. 2015. The Cost to Britain’s Children of the Trend Away from Marriage. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2019/ 09/MF-­p aper-­C ost-­o f-­t rend-­a way-­f rom-­m arriage-­v 1.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Brierley, Peter. 2005. Pulling out of the Nose Dive. London: Christian Research. British Social Attitudes Survey 36. 2018. https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-­ report/british-­social-­attitudes-­36/key-­findings.aspx. Accessed 16 July 2021. Brueggemann, Walter. 2014. The Practice of Homefulness. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books. CentrePoint. 2019. The Youth Homelessness Databank. https://centrepoint.org. uk/databank/. Accessed 16 July 2021. Dale, Jimmy, and Dave Male. 2019. Report for General Synod: Children and Young People. https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/ 202001/GS%202161%20Children%20and%20Youth%20Ministry%20Full%20 with%20Appendix%20-­%20Final.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Davies, Bernard. 1976. Part-Time Youth Work in an Industrial Community. Leicester: National Youth Agency. de Botton, Alain. 2007. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin. Department for Education. 2018. Children Looked after in England (Including Adoption), Year Ending 31 March 2018. https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/gover nment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/757922/Children_looked_after_in_England_2018_Text_revised.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Descartes, Rene. 1996. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies by Rene Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hagell, Ann, and Rakhee Shah. 2019. Key Data on Young People 2019: Latest Information and Statistics. https://www.youngpeopleshealth.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2019/09/AYPH_KDYP2019_FullVersion.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, 239–256. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 3-35. Trans. W. Lovitt. New York; Hagerstown; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row.

2  ROBBIE: NO PLACE LIKE HOME 

41

Howell, David, and Paul Fenton. Report of the Consultation: Christian Youth Work and Ministry across the UK. Christian Youth Work Consortium. http:// www.cte.org.uk/Publisher/File.aspx?ID=182924. Accessed 22 July 2021. International Organization for Migration. 2020. World Migration Report. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Jennings, Willie James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. Lessof, Carli, Andy Ross, Richard Brind, Emily Bell, and Sarah Newton. 2016. Longitudinal Study of Young People in England Cohort 2: Health and Wellbeing at Wave 2. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/599871/LSYPE2_w2-­ research_report.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. 2018. Housing: Experimental Statistical Release. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/764301/ Statutory_Homelessness_Statistical_Release_April_-­_June_2018.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Muirhead, Adam. 2020. The Albemarle Report, 1960. Youth & Policy. https:// www.youthandpolicy.org/articles/the-­albemarle-­report-­1960/. Accessed 22 July 2021. Refugee Council. 2019. Children in the Asylum System. https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2019/06/Children-­in-­the-­Asylum-­ System-­May-­2019.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Ritchie, Daisy, and Jon Ord. 2016. The Experience of Open Access Youth Work: The Voice of Young People. Journal of Youth Studies 20: 3. Root, Andrew. 2017. Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s Obsession with Youthfulness. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Savage, Sara, Bob Mayo, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, and Graham Cray. 2006. Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 15- to 25-Year-Olds. London: Church House. Smith, Christian, and Melina L. Denton. 2005. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Lianne. 2019. Overcoming the Poverty of Hope. Barnados. https://www. barnardos.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/Barnardo%27s%20new%20 report%20-­%20Overcoming%20poverty%20of%20hope.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2021. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge; London: Belknap. TES reporter. 2020. Most young people ‘worried about coronavirus impact’. https://www.tes.com/news/most-­young-­people-­worried-­about-­coronavirus-­ impact. Accessed 6 Aug 2021.

42 

P. HILL

Thompson, Ron, Lisa Russell, and Robin Simmons. 2014. Space, Place and Social Exclusion: An Ethnographic Study of Young People Outside Education and Employment. Journal of Youth Studies 17: 1. The Children’s Society. 2019. Good Childhood Report. https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/good-­childhood. Accessed 16 July 2021. Thunberg, Greta. 2019. ‘Our House Is on Fire’, Davos Speech. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-ison-fire-gretathunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate. Accessed 16 July 2021. Tweed, Thomas. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press. Voas, David. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. European Sociological Review 25: 2. Volf, Miroslav. The World as God’s Home. Cadbury Lectures, Birmingham University https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/theologyandreligion/events/cadburylectures/2019/index.aspx. Accessed 9 July 2021. Youthscape. 2016. Losing Heart: How Churches Have Lost Confidence in Their Work With Children and Young People. https://www.youthscape.co.uk/ research/publications/losing-­heart. Accessed 16 July 2021.

CHAPTER 3

Michael: The Youth Club Home

We gather around the table for the daily leaders meeting before drop-in. Young leader Michael is here with us; it’s his 18th birthday, and he’s brought in some cupcakes his mum made. John explains the plan for the evening, and then it is time to pray. We close our eyes. James prays for Michael, saying thanks to God for him for all of the laughter and jokes that he brings, and also for his cleaning and mopping (there are some laughs in the group, and I open my eyes to see Michael smiling). Freya prays that young people would feel safe at the drop-in tonight. John also prays for Michael that it would be a great year ahead for him. Volunteer Mark is the last to pray, praying that young people might ‘feel more fully themselves here than they do elsewhere’. Once the meeting ends, the leaders make their way to the various rooms of the drop-in and the doors are opened. I walk through to the kitchen with Michael, and spot two very large cylindrical Tupperware containers holding a bounty of cupcakes. Michael explains to me what each of the different cupcakes are: some are vegan, some are egg free, and others normal. He seems really chuffed with them. We chat about what he is planning to do for his birthday. James makes a joke about him visiting a casino or having a big party, and how all of the leaders will crash it. Michael smiles but comments that he has college tomorrow, so will probably just have a quiet night. He starts describing to me the tattoos he is hoping to get. Now that he’s 18, he can legally get one, even though his mum doesn’t want him to. He is hoping to get a scorpion tattoo at the bottom of his right arm, and a skull with a dragon coming out. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_3

43

44 

P. HILL

I try to conceal my horror, asking, ‘Really? Are you sure you want to get those? They will be there forever.’ He explains that he has these tattoos on his GTA character (a computer game avatar), and therefore wants them in real life too. Youth leader Freya appears at the door carrying a large helium ‘18’ balloon on a piece of string. She catches the tail end of our conversation, and chips in: ‘What! No don’t get tattoos Michael. Seriously, don’t. As someone who has tattoos here, here, and here [she points to the locations of her tattoos] let me tell you—you don’t want them.’ A moment later, Freya has gathered the other young people into the kitchen and everyone begins singing a raucous Happy Birthday to Michael. He runs away into another room, embarrassed at the attention. The other young people flock to the cupcakes in the kitchen, and ask me how much they are. I explain that they are free as Michael’s mum made them for his birthday, and talk through the different types. The cupcakes are grabbed and eaten with glee, through muffled shouts of ‘Happy Birthday Michael!’

Michael is a ‘core’ member of the drop-in. He is one of the longest standing attendees, having been involved for a number of years, and knows the leaders and other young people well. He will be at the drop-in most days after college, sometimes showing up early and chatting to the leaders or hanging around outside with friends. Michael also spends time with the leaders and young people outside of the drop-in, following them to youth groups or churches that they run or are a part of. Michael participates in many of the activities that the Youth Hub offers and will be one of the young people present at fundraising events, one-off trips, summer camps, Christian festivals, or work experience placements. During my time at the Youth Hub, I would often spot Michael walking around the building in only his socks, listening to music. He would dump his coat and bag as soon as he walked in the door, taking off his shoes. He knew—more than the leaders sometimes—where things were kept in the kitchen and how the appliances worked. From the outside at least, he appeared to feel comfortable at the drop-in. Michael is in stark contrast to Robbie, whom we met in the previous chapter. Sadly, Robbie never seemed able to relax at the drop-in in the way that Michael did. In my interview with Michael, I asked him how he felt about the dropin and what his relationships with the youth workers were like: Michael: I’d say I’ve got like quite good friendships with the youth workers here, because they are just so friendly and you can just

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

45

talk to them about anything. Like if you’re nervous or if you’re anxious about something, or if you just need some help in general, you can talk to the leaders about it. […] It’s definitely like a second family, second home. Because you can just come and chill. You have Xboxes, PlayStations and computers, you can kind of go and do what you want. Go on Facebook, play video games. Phoebe: You said ‘second home’ there […]. What does it mean in your head—those words ‘second home’—why is it like a ‘second home’ for you? Michael: Because like everyone here is just so friendly and caring. It just feels like they are part of your family, your extended family. One big happy family. Which sometimes have arguments [laugh]. Phoebe: Yeah, maybe not perfect. Michael: But no family is perfect […]. Michael was not alone in describing the youth club as a ‘home’ and a ‘family’. The rest of this chapter will explore how and in what ways this youth club was a home for its members. There is no one definition of what it means to have or be at ‘home’, and the conversation around home is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, with multiple complexities.1 Home is sometimes related to the physical structure of a house2 which can give a sense of personal identity and status. Others argue that home cannot be conflated with home ownership,3 but rather that it refers to a socio-spatial system where relationships are central;4 home is a complex interaction of sociality and place. Home does not necessarily signify a single place, but multiple places simultaneously,5 all of which hold a certain level of 1  Mallett provides a hugely helpful summary, see Mallett, Shelley. 2004. Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature. The Sociological Review 52 (1): 62–89. 2  Parsell, Cameron. 2010. Home Is Where the House Is: The Meaning of Home for People Sleeping Rough. Housing Studies 27 (2): 159–73. 3  Windsong, Elena Ariel. 2010. There Is No Place Like Home: Complexities in Exploring Home and Place Attachment. The Social Science Journal 47 (1): 205–14. 4  Robinson, Carole, Colin Reid, and Heather Cooke. 2010. A Home Away from Home: The Meaning of Home According to Families of Residents with Dementia. Dementia 9 (4): 490–508. 5  Sixsmith, Judith. 1986. The Meaning of Home: An Exploratory Study of Environmental Experience. Journal of Environmental Psychology 6 (4): 281–98.

46 

P. HILL

meaning and attachment. Home can also be understood as a haven or a refuge,6 a comfortable, secure, and safe place.7 For some, ‘home’ and ‘family’ are almost interchangeable, while for others the latter privileges the idealistic vision of the nuclear family prevalent in culture.8 Home can also be understood in a less positive light, as a place of difficulty, of oppressive gender roles, or of physical violence.9 There is also an interesting relationship between home and the foreign, as home is not necessarily a place of fixed boundaries.10 In this sense home contains an aspect of journeying and is less about where you are from but where you are going.11 In the phenomenological tradition, as has been explored in relation to Heidegger, home can also be understood as a verb, as a way of being in the world and a manner of existing, beyond simply a place or socio-spatial system. Other studies of youth work projects have highlighted the ‘home’ or ‘family’ nature of youth work, particularly in youth club contexts like the drop-in.12 However, this is only mentioned in passing in these studies and is a fleeting comment rather than the main focus of the research. The most significant comparable study to mine is A Place to Call Home, an ethnography of after-school clubs in America.13 In this research, Barton Hirsch found that in addition to providing a fun place to spend time with friends, family and home language was frequently used by the leaders and young 6  Moore, Barrington. 1984. Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. 7  Collier, A., J. L. Phillips, and R. Iedema. 2015. The Meaning of Home at the End of Life: A Video-Reflexive Ethnography Study. Palliative Medicine 29 (8): 695–702. 8  Wagner, David. 1993. The Family: No Haven. In Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community, ed. David Wagner, 45–66. Boulder; Oxford: Westview Press. 9  Wardhaugh, Julia. 1999. The Unaccommodated Woman: Home, Homelessness and Identity. The Sociological Review 47: 91–109. 10  Ahmed, Sara. 1999. Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–47. 11  Ginsberg, Robert. 1999. Meditations on Homelessness and Being at Home: In the Form of a Dialogue. In The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. G.  John M. Abbarno, 29–40. Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 12  See for example Ritchie, Daisy, and Jon Ord. 2016. The Experience of Open Access Youth Work: The Voice of Young People. Journal of Youth Studies 20 (3): 269–82; Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa. 2013. Exploring Young People’s and Youth Workers’ Experiences of Spaces for ‘Youth Development’: Creating Cultures of Participation. Journal of Youth Studies 17 (1): 26–41. 13  Hirsch, Barton. 2005. A Place to Call Home: After-School Programs for Urban Youth. Washington, DC; New York: Teachers College Press.

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

47

people. Hirsch explores the important role of place attachment for teenagers’ psychological wellbeing and identity, and the part that an after-­school club can play in enabling young people to explore different social roles and establish their identities. The findings from Hirsch’s study resonate with mine and corroborate what I have found in a different context. The contrast between Robbie and Michael, highlighted at the beginning, reveals something significant for this study. From the outset, I want to be clear that this theological vision of Christian youth work is not a deficit model.14 It is not that young people lack home and that we can solve the problem by giving them a home. As subsequent chapters will explore, we all have a complicated relationship with home and all need to find ways to be at home in the world. What’s particularly interesting about Robbie and Michael is that Robbie’s challenges at his familial home seem to compromise his ability to experience home at the drop-in, while Michael’s seemingly positive and supportive home background sits alongside his experience of the drop-in as a second home and second family. If this was a deficit model, Robbie would find home and be helped, while Michael wouldn’t ‘need’ the drop-in to be a home. This was not the case. Many different young people, from a diverse range of home backgrounds, described the drop-in as a home and family. It was therefore not only young people who lacked something from their familial home who engaged with the drop-in in this way (if they did), but many others seemed to find the home reality at the drop-in meaningful, whether their familial home was a positive or negative place. The drop-in home is therefore not to be perceived as filling a void, but rather as offering an additional home for the young people. There is also a necessary mutuality to being at home. No one, it seems, can become at home alone. Although this chapter will focus primarily on the young people’s experiences of home at the drop-in, this must be placed in the context that the youth workers—and I with them—also found a home at the drop-in. This shall be explored in greater detail in Chap. 7. The questions that will provide the focus for the remainder of this chapter are: what does it mean to be at home in a youth club? Why did the young people experience it as a home? The intention will be to provide a ‘thick description’ of what home looks and feels like in a youth club

14  For a discussion of deficit approaches to youth work, see Jeffs, Tony, and Mark K. Smith. 1999. The Problem of ‘Youth’ for Youth Work. Youth & Policy 62: 45–66.

48 

P. HILL

context.15 There are five main aspects which emerged as significant, through the fieldwork observations and interviews with the youth leaders and young people: the environment, the language used, the relationships, the practices, and the experience of feeling ‘at home’. Each of these contributed to the construction of the home and family reality at the youth club, and may be aspects of other homes in other settings. This chapter will also explore why being at home and being human are fundamentally connected and why becoming at home on the Earth is an essential task for all of us.

The Environment The Youth Hub is not your average youth club building. Inside, the space is chic and modern, designed by a high-end agency as their charitable project of the year. The youth drop-in space feels like a converted loft in Brooklyn, with its exposed brick walls and industrial pipes—or perhaps a bar in East London with atmospheric lighting and a pumping sound system. Given the wide-scale and devastating financial cuts to the youth service in the UK, the stereotypical image of a youth centre is of a run-down community space, with a few (but not enough) broken chairs, tatty sofas, and, if you are lucky, a pool or table tennis table. To have a space at all is fortunate in the current climate. In this context, the Youth Hub is extravagant. In addition to successful funding campaigns, written into the fabric of the building is the belief that the physical environment of youth work is important. The walls, furniture, and atmosphere are not just a backdrop for the relational work or activities that occur, but shape the work that happens in the space. The main focus for those writing about Christian youth work and youth ministry is often relationships and the power of relationships for change.16 Rarely, if ever, is the physical environment 15  This is Clifford Geertz’s term (see Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana). Willis adds that thick description is, ‘The recording in their “practical state” (as they come to you) of relations and binaries which may yet have no name or attendant theoretical explanation, but which twitch somewhere as relevant on the theoretical radar and offer fertile clues for advancing understanding and for deepening your appreciation of the relation “between elements”’ (Willis, Paul. 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination. Oxford: Polity Press, 114.). 16  Relationships are perceived to be at the ‘heart of good youth work’ (Blacker, Huw. 2010. Relationships, Friendships and Youth Work. In Youth Work Practice, eds. Tony Jeffs and Mark June Smith, 15–30. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 18.) and being

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

49

mentioned.17 For the Youth Hub, however, the physical environment is key in creating a home for the young people who attend. The drop-in is intentionally designed to reflect a home. In its very DNA, the space therefore makes a statement to the young people who come. If it is a home, however, it is certainly not like any other home I have been in. The drop-in is designed in a square, with four rooms leading into each other. As you enter the building on the ground floor drop-in level, on your left is the ‘living room’. The room is spacious, with several clusters of sofas positioned around TV screens and small coffee tables. On the far side, a bookcase is bedecked with photo frames of smiling young people, and on the right is a high work station with computers. Between the two is an open doorway leading through to the ‘dining room’. In the dining room stands a large reclaimed wood dining table, which can comfortably seat 12 people. More dining tables are concealed behind blackboards, waiting to be folded down and used for the Wednesday night dinner. A full-size pool table stands in the far corner and is always occupied by at least two young people. Walking through to the ‘kitchen’, you are welcomed by a large middle island and state-of-the-art appliances on either side. Bar stools around the island create additional space for young people to hang out and sit, while a leader makes them a drink or cooks the dinner. The final room—which eventually leads you back to where you began at the entrance—is what’s known as the ‘quiet room’. It is here that young people can relax in peace and privacy, listening to their music or having one-on-one conversations with a youth worker in a glass-walled

able to relate to young people is a key capability required of a youth worker (Skinner, Judith. 2010. Finding and Recognising Youth Workers. In Journeying Together: Growing Youth Work and Youth Workers in Local Communities, eds. A.  Rogers and M.  J. Smith, 40–51. Lyme Regis: Russell House Publishing, 43.). Discussion of the origins of the relational approach in youth ministry can be found in Root, Andrew. 2007. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 51; Sudworth, T., Graham Cray, and Chris Russell. 2007. Mission-Shaped Youth: Rethinking Young People and Church. London: Church House Publishing, 4–5; Ward, Pete. 1997.Youthwork and the Mission of God: Frameworks for Relational Outreach. London: SPCK. xii. 17  A few studies do mention the role and significance of place. For example, Nash, Sally, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, and Bob Mayo. 2007. Raising Christian Consciousness: Creating Place. Journal of Youth and Theology 6 (2): 41–59.

50 

P. HILL

mentoring space. It is only when you stand in the quiet room that you realise how loudly the music is blaring in all of the other rooms, as it feels suddenly calm. More than just an attractive space that young people might want to be in, there is a hope that the drop-in provides a different sort of environment to the young peoples’ home environment. When young people arrive at the centre for the first time, they are welcomed by a youth leader and walked through the space. I witnessed one such initiation moment between youth leader Miriam and three new young people. Miriam introduced herself to the young people, who were drinking their free milkshake in the kitchen. She started to explain that the drop-in is set up like a house, with a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and a quiet space. She went on to say that there is no swearing in the drop-in, ‘because this is our house, and we want people to be safe’. One of the young people mumbled something about being able to swear at home, to which Miriam responded by saying that in this house, there is no swearing. In these first moments with new young people, the culture of the drop-in is communicated clearly. There are only a few boundaries that the young people are expected to abide by, including no swearing and no play-fighting. Young people will receive an immediate ban from the club for the day if they are carrying drugs or knives, while warnings will be given for breaking the other rules. If a young person receives two warnings on an evening, they will be asked to leave. After being banned, young people are warmly welcomed back the following day and encouraged to return. Although Miriam made it clear that swearing is not allowed, the rule about swearing was managed flexibly at the discretion of the leaders. On a few occasions, I overheard young people challenging and telling off their friends for swearing, even if no leaders were present. The ownership the young people had over the rules, and the way in which they were enforced by the leaders, resonates with what Bernard Davies calls the negotiation of rules in a youth work setting. He explains that ‘sufficient freedom and informal and sociable control of their [the rules] use will need to exist to enable their users to experience high levels of ownership of them: as safe, welcoming, flexible, consultative, dialogical’.18 The young people appeared to participate in the enforcement of the culture at the youth club, while also experiencing the rules as flexible and dialogical. 18  Davies, Bernard. 2015. Youth Work: A Manifesto for Our Times—Revisited. Youth and Policy 114: 96–117 (105).

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

51

For the staff, there was a connection between creating a positive atmosphere at the club and seeing change in the young people who attended. In my interview with youth worker James, he told the story of a particular teenage boy who had joined the drop-in nine months previously. Each Christmas, once the Christmas tree at the drop-in is no longer needed, the staff deliver it to the family of a young person who may not otherwise have one. James described his experience of dropping the Christmas tree round to the boy’s house: James:

We actually went, me and Zoe went around their house at Christmas, to drop off the drop-in Christmas tree, after we [had] finished with it. The house just stinks of smoke and really messy—[the] home environment is not good, the TV out on the front lawn, kind of stereotypical. So that’s the kind of home he comes from. And coming to drop-in, when he first arrived he was really, really quiet. No friends, came with his sister. So she kind of drags him along, and he’s really quiet. That was maybe nine months ago, and now he’s still quite quiet, but he’s got loads of friends, he’ll run up to you and be like, ‘Ah James, can we play? Can we have a game of pool, a game of Fifa.’ I feel like now, he kind of has a voice, and I feel like—I don’t know entirely why, what has changed him. But I think a massive part of it is coming into our culture of respect and positivity and, actually, of joy almost, and him spending so much time in drop-in. That actually he’s been able to come out of his self a little bit.

James attributes the change he observed in this teenage boy to being part of the Youth Hub’s ‘culture of respect and positivity’ and that, as a consequence, he found his ‘voice’. He paints a negative picture, perhaps somewhat judgementally, of the teenage boy’s home and hints at some of the challenges he may face. James’s description of the boy’s journey resonates with Alain de Botton’s sentiment that we are ultimately ‘different people in different places’.19 De Botton draws an explicit connection between poor living conditions and a loss of hope, explaining that it is harder to be optimistic in certain environments.20 The image of a messy  de Botton, Alain. 2007. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin, 13.  de Botton. The Architecture of Happiness, 106.

19 20

52 

P. HILL

and smoke-filled house, with an old TV abandoned on the front lawn, is not one that would be described as ‘optimistic’. If de Botton is right that environments shape who we are and what we believe about ourselves and our futures, then this boy’s home context will be shaping him in a certain way. It is also unsurprising that he is a different person in different places; there is something about the environment at the club that enables him to find his voice.

Language If our environments shape us, then nowhere is this truer than the places we call home. Our homes enable us to come home to our genuine selves, as they make available to us, over and over, the important truths about who we are.21 To call the drop-in a ‘home’ is therefore to say something important and profound: it enables the young people, in some way, to come home to their genuine selves. The language of home and family appeared regularly in the conversations and interviews I had with the young people and the leaders. Below are several examples, starting with the youth workers: Val: Freya:

It’s almost like—this is so twee I hate it—it’s like we’re family. So I think what I really value about working at the Youth Hub is that there is an emphasis on team, and it wanting to be a real family feel. Sally: I think it’s sort of easier to talk to young people about difficult things in life if you are not doing it like a teacher. So if you are doing it from more of a relationship base, so it doesn’t have to be like a friend, it could be that whole idea of creating a kind of family space, so that there are young people who might wanna talk about something but don’t want to talk to their parents about it, but they know that they’ve got somewhere safe where they can come and talk about it. Hannah: Drop-in is a home from home, which they might not have elsewhere. They’ve obviously got their own homes but a sense of, I belong here, this is my—I own this space, I’m welcome here.

 de Botton, 123.

21

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

53

As well as the staff, young people like Michael spoke about the drop-in centre as a second home and family and used familial terms to describe their relationships with leaders (such as auntie) and other young people (such as sibling). Here are a few examples from my interviews with the young people: Shahid:

And it’s more like a family, every time you went there you got to know people better, and like we did all sorts of things. It’s pretty fun. Charlotte: Because like, when loads of bad stuff happens at home and on my streets and like when I come here it’s like a second home, sort of thing. Jonas: I feel like everyone knew each other. I think we had like this family aspect. Beth: The thing that kept drawing me back was that it’s such a family atmosphere. Bryony: Everyone knows everyone. It’s just like a big family. The two terms—home and family—were used interchangeably by the leaders and young people. Where I asked questions about the drop-in being like a home, replies often included the term family. Given that the drop-in was intended to be a home in its design and that the leaders frequently talked about the drop-in as a home and family to the young people who came, it is possible that the young people picked up this language from them. The use of home and family language in this case may therefore be described as ‘performative’. Performativity is concerned with how language shapes our experience, and is a productive influence, rather than simply being one that reflects an environment.22 In other words, to talk about the drop-in as a home not only names the fact that it is a home, but also in some sense shapes whether or not the young people experience it as a home. Performative language also works by frequency; the more leaders talk about the drop-in as a home, the more likely the young people will experience it as a home. This can be described as the force of iterability, as performative language has a cumulative effect on account of its

22  Pennycook, Alastair. 2004. Performativity and Language Studies. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 1 (1): 1–19 (13).

54 

P. HILL

‘citationality’.23 The frequent use of these terms by both leaders and young people indicates that the home and family identity is sedimented in the community of the youth club.24

Practices The aim of an ethnographic study like this one is to capture a culture and document what people in a certain place spend their time doing. Many of the things that the drop-in community spent their time doing—the practices, routines, habits, or rituals—were suggestive of home and family. One of these, and perhaps the most significant, was eating dinner together. Eating a meal together is an act that evokes sights, smells, tastes, and feelings of home and family; it is something we do with the people we like, that we trust and that we want to get to know better. According to David Ford, it is a practice that both reflects and enacts the reality of home and family among a group of people.25 Just as language not only names but can shape how we experience something, sharing a meal can also be performative, as it says something about the nature of the relationships between the people around the table. This was not lost on staff member James, who felt the importance of sharing meals at the drop-in keenly: James:

I think a massive part is Wednesday night dinner where we actually sit down and share food together. I feel like maybe it’s a bit of a cliché but a lot of the young people don’t have sit-down family meals, they don’t sit around with their brothers and sisters or their parents, or whoever, and have those conversations. I’ve grown up where we always sat around the dinner table and I look back on that and I think that’s such a beautiful thing, I think that’s so important—bonding over food. I genuinely feel like dinner parties is one of the greatest ways of making friends and taking relationships deeper. Just loving each other. I think that to be able to bring young people into that and show them that, I think is quite a beautiful thing, a privilege. I just hope that they see how impor-

 Pennycook. Performativity and Language Studies, 14–15.  For more on his use of ‘sedimented’, see Pennycook, 14. 25  Ford, David. 1997. The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press. 23 24

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

55

tant that is and they recognise actually this is great, sitting down and having good conversations with us, and their mates as well. As well as eating dinner together, another significant practice was the celebration of birthdays. As with Michael at the start of the chapter, it was normal for there to be cakes and balloons and a fuss made of young people on their birthdays. Glancing through the Youth Hub’s online calendar during my fieldwork, I was surprised to see that alongside the regular meetings and important events were reminders about where the young people’s birthdays fell in the year. Nearly every day of the week had a young person’s name next to it in a small box. To this day, I still receive pop-ups on my laptop in the mornings, alerting me of whose birthday it is. Although it is not only families who celebrate birthdays, it was striking that many of the young people chose to be at the drop-in on their special day, rather than at home. Beyond specific practices like celebrating birthdays, there were also many occasions where young people and youth leaders would simply be together, without any particular agenda.26 Although functional activities like cleaning bedrooms and doing homework might happen at home, one hallmark of familial life is the sheer numbers of hours, days, weeks, and years that are simply spent in each other’s company. This can also mean, perhaps particularly for teenagers, being bored together. Unlike other ­service roles, such as teachers, social workers, and counsellors, the relationship between a youth worker and a young person can be an end in itself or certainly more than a means to some other end or goal. Many of the young people spend more time simply being with the youth workers at the drop-in than they do with anyone else in their lives.

Relationships Before anything else, including having fun, relaxing, playing pool, or having good conversations, the young people overwhelmingly attended the drop-in to see people.27 As we saw earlier, many of the young people used 26  For more on the significance of ‘being with’, see Wells, Samuel. 2015. A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 27  This was identified in a survey carried out by staff, mentioned in Chap. 2, in relation to the second motivation which was to ‘get away from home’.

56 

P. HILL

the language of family to describe their relationships at the drop-in or used familial terms such as sibling or auntie to describe others. In my interview with youth worker Freya, she highlighted how central relationships were to youth work and identified consistency and care as key aspects of the Youth Hub’s approach: Freya:

I think relationships are kind of the centre of what we do in a lot of ways. I don’t think you can really do good youth work without relationships. I think if you’re trying to, you know, get alongside someone and support them and talk to them and even, whatever you’re trying to do, work with them, if there’s no relationship I feel like they are unlikely to engage as well as if you do have a relationship. And I think for so many of these young people they have so many broken relationships in their families and other areas of their life, to have someone who is there, who is consistent, who they know, who isn’t gonna let them down, who isn’t gonna give up on them, no matter what—I think that speaks volumes to them, like really massively, when there’s so much inconsistency in their life, and so much brokenness, and—yeah, so many difficult things. For them to know, actually, that person does really care about me and they are always going to be there, and I can always come to drop-in and I can talk to that person or whoever, I think that’s really important.

It was through this relational approach that the youth workers at the Youth Hub were able to offer holistic care and support to young people. This was employed flexibly, with signposting and further support tailored to their needs, be they mental health issues, bullying, school, work, faith exploration, or home life. There were also consistent patterns in the needs that appeared at the drop-in. Several of the young people talked to me specifically about self-harm, either as something they had struggled with historically or as something they were still battling. Nineteen-year-old Beth, who talked about the Youth Hub as having a ‘family atmosphere’, put her journey of healing from self-harm and anxiety down to the relationships she had formed at the drop-in. In her interview, she relayed to me how she had struggled with social anxiety and self-harm before she joined. She found solid friendships at the drop-in, something she hadn’t experienced elsewhere. When she finally let out

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

57

what she described as her ‘big secret’, people were supportive and encouraging and helped her to find a way out from these patterns of behaviour. The Youth Hub works closely with other services, such as CAHMS, and will often signpost young people with particular needs to professional help or resources available to them. Saying this, it is interesting that for Beth, it was not counselling or professional help that she believes enabled her to find freedom from self-harm; it was the family atmosphere at the drop-in. So far in this chapter, I have focused on young people who were core members at the Youth Hub, and who described it as a family. However, there were a range of different ways in which young people engaged with the drop-in and to varying degrees; the Youth Hub was not as significant to all of the young people as it was for Beth. During one particular term, 699 young people attended the drop-in. Of these, 13 young people attended between three and five days every week consistently. This is a significant level of involvement, with young people potentially spending more time at the drop-in than at home. Young people like Michael and Beth were among this group. According to the register, 21 young people attended two days a week consistently and 75 attended one day a week. Overall, therefore, 109 young people attended the drop-in at least once a week, which by usual standards would be described as regular engagement or attendance. This left 590 young people who attended less than once a week. They may have attended regularly for a few days a week and then dropped off the radar, attended every so often, or may have been on the register from a previous term. For some young people, therefore, attending the drop-in is not about relationships with youth workers; it is simply a place to hang out with their peers or play computer games on an occasional basis. As Spence, Devanney, and Noonan explain, however, even if the young people are only attending the provision as a place to be, away from the gaze of other powers or institutions, it is providing an important service.28 Even for young people who have a casual relationship with the drop-in, therefore, it can still play an important role. Some young people, perhaps those who attend once a week, might enjoy the atmosphere, enjoy some of the activities, and enjoy chatting to leaders. They may not, however, engage with the drop-in as a family. Despite this, they may enjoy some of the benefits of the youth club

28  Spence, J., C. Devanney, and K. Noonan. 2006. Youth Work: Voices of Practice. Leicester: The National Youth Agency, 21.

58 

P. HILL

home reality, such as its safety, holistic support, practices, or positive environment. There was another important way in which the drop-in relationships reflected a family. The drop-in community is made up of a web of relationships between many different young people, youth workers, and youth work volunteers. During the time I spent at the Youth Hub, I became part of this web. Over the course of the week, not only would large numbers of young people attend but up to 30 youth workers and volunteers staffed the drop-in over the five evenings. The young people therefore developed multiple different relationships with peers, staff, and volunteers. Where other projects may struggle with just one main leader and face challenges if that leader moves on, the young people at the drop-in are held in an intergenerational web of relationships. This means that even if a particular leader leaves, posing challenges to the consistency of relationships at the drop-in, other leaders and significant relationships remain. Like Theseus’s ship, which sets out to sail and one by one has each part replaced on its voyage, the drop-in community may not consist of exactly the same individuals as 5, 10, or 15 years previously, but the young people are held by the consistent family relational structure. The large number of attendees does pose a challenge to the drop-in’s consideration as a ‘family’; not many families have 699 members. However, as we have seen, not all of the young people engage with the drop-in as a family or are expected to. There remains a core level of engagement, which is not seemingly compromised by the large group. Perhaps the drop-in is best described, in Michael’s words, as an ‘extended family’. Beyond its size, there is another important difference between a nuclear family and the drop-in family. A nuclear family, for good or for bad, is not one that you choose. The drop-in family, however, is one that can be chosen, one that the young people can decide to affiliate with.29 The notion of a chosen family is prominent in Queer Theory and among the LGBTQ+ community, and can be defined as ‘nonbiological kinship bonds […] deliberately chosen for the purpose of mutual support and love’.30 Although this definition may not accurately reflect the nature of the 29  See Atkinson, K., E.  Chico, and S.  S. Horn. 2016. Youth Work for Social Change: Preparing Individuals to Work with Youth in Diverse Urban Contexts. In The Changing Landscape of Youth Work: Theory and Practice for an Evolving Field, eds. K. Pozzoboni and B. Kirshner, 229–48. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc, 243. 30  Gates, Trevor. 2017. Chosen Families. In The Sage Encyclopedia of Marriage, Family, and Couples Counseling, eds. J.  Carlson and S.  Dermer, 240–2. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

59

drop-in family, it is helpful in emphasising the voluntary nature of participation in the drop-in community and a close kinship that is ‘deliberately chosen’.

Experience In the previous chapter we saw that having a home is not the same as being, or feeling, at home. Feeling ‘at home’ is difficult to define, but at the drop-in it seemed to involve feeling comfortable, feeling relaxed, feeling welcome, feeling safe, and feeling able to be who you are. Michael’s ability to walk around the drop-in with his shoes off, and to help himself to the items in the fridge, suggests a certain level of at-homeness. This level of ownership and relaxation was encouraged by the leaders, as James articulated in his interview: Phoebe: James:

You mentioned that the drop-in is a safe place. What does the word safe mean for you and how do they [the young people] experience it as safe? I think being welcomed, being comfortable and being welcomed well. To feel comfortable, to feel able to go to the kitchen and get a drink or to not have to ask to do something like, ‘Can I play this? Can I do this?’ We want it to feel like a home from home, that’s definitely one of the big things we’ve said in the vision for drop-in is we want it to be a home from home. We want them to come in and to take their shoes off and put their feet up. They’re comfortable to sit on the sofa and put their feet up but also to take their shoes off before they put their feet on the sofa. We want them to respect the place but also to feel comfortable as well. To just relax and sort of do their own thing.

As James articulates, young people taking off their shoes was a sign of both relaxation and respect. Implicit in this image is the notion that the more the young people feel at home at the drop-in, the more they will feel a sense of ownership and want to protect and look after the furniture. Feeling at home is also about feeling safe and secure. In my interview with staff member Claire, she told the story of a young person called Jasmine who had attended the drop-in for a number of years. Like 19-year-­ old Beth, Jasmine came into contact with the Youth Hub through a

60 

P. HILL

self-­harm group at her school. After the group finished she carried on with one-to-one mentoring, as she had become a young carer for her mum. Then her mum died. The Youth Hub, according to Claire, became Jasmine’s ‘safe place’, a place where she did not have to explain everything from start to finish, or answer questions, but could just be with people. She would hang around in the office with the staff team and did not have to be alone at home. For Jasmine, it seems, the Youth Hub provided emotional safety and a place where she felt known and understood. Another aspect of safety is protection from harm or from participation in risky behaviours. The drop-in initially began with exactly this focus, and a different title—‘Safe and Sound’—with the intention of getting young people off the streets and involved in positive activities. Eighteen-year-old Shahid told me about the intentional decision he had made to attend the drop-in as a self-preservation strategy: Shahid:

Yeah, I feel like I’ve grown a lot since I’ve been here. Because like, some of my friends and my old friends they get into a bad crowd or they always do like bad things, but when you come to drop-in it kind of stabilises you as an adult, and what you do you will always get support from it, and you will always find a way out from any problem that you have here.

For Shahid, attending the drop-in was a conscious step he had taken to avoid participating in other less positive activities elsewhere and being swept up with a bad crowd. With any home space, and in acknowledgement of the powerful influence that a home can have on an individual, safeguarding and protecting young people from abuse is of paramount importance. Abuse can thrive in settings where young people are made to feel safe and are therefore vulnerable to the influence of those who would wish them harm. Tragically, history has shown us that church settings can offer the ideal context for abusers, who groom young people through a web of manipulation and coercion and play on the power dynamics of the context. One member of staff at the Youth Hub described safeguarding as a missional imperative and it is evidently a priority for the youth workers. For all of us who work with young people, safeguarding cannot be taken seriously enough. We also must be mindful of the potential danger of settings where there is potential for manipulation and exploiting of power, something we shall return to in Chap. 7.

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

61

The final aspect of feeling at home is being able to be yourself. Despite not being able to offer the privacy of a bedroom or a familial home, young people are free to come as they are to the drop-in, whether they are feeling sociable or not. I often saw young people sitting by themselves in the quiet room, with their earphones in and listening to music. Youth workers would say ‘hello’ and ask them how they are, but if it was obvious they wanted time alone then they would be left to their own devices. Young people are therefore welcome to attend the drop-in exactly as they are, even if they want to be alone.

Heidegger: Home and Being Human So far this chapter has explored the five different ways in which home was experienced and created at the youth club. Through my interviews and observations, it was clear that many of the young people—regardless of their home background—related to the club as a home. There may be many potential aims for a youth work project, such as raising aspirations, protecting young people from harm, or enhancing young peoples’ wellbeing, so why is creating home a good and important aim to have? First of all, the fact that home is being created at this youth club, and is considered a meaningful venture by the organisation, is itself significant. Home in this case is what can be described as an ‘indigenous classification scheme’, a way of participants in this particular culture describing and articulating what is meaningful about it.31 Meaning is co-constructed, and if the participants find it meaningful, then it is meaningful. In this particular instance, therefore, no further justification is needed of why home is a significant aim, as it is already a fruitful and positive motivator and vision for the Youth Hub. The next question, though, is whether or not the approach of this particular youth club bears significance for a wider approach to youth work. For the remainder of this chapter I will argue that being at home is intimately connected to being human. To explore this connection, and home in wider perspective, we shall return to Martin Heidegger and his most substantial and well-known work: Being and Time. In Being and Time, Heidegger explores what it is to be a human being, the kind of being that Dasein is. Dasein finds itself ‘thrown’ into the world, 31  This is Brewer’s term, see Brewer, John. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press, 16.

62 

P. HILL

with being-in-the-world its prior and pre-reflective state. It is not that Dasein is first a being, and then finds a world, but rather is always already caught up in the world around it. Heidegger explains: Being-in is not a ‘property’ which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could be just as well as it could with it. It is not the case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-­ of-­ Being towards the ‘world’—a world with which he provides himself occasionally.32

Dasein is essentially in the world. In critique of the philosophical dualism of Descartes, Heidegger argues that Dasein does not emerge from an ‘inner sphere’ to reach the things and people around it.33 Dasein is a being-in-the-world and is therefore a being in relation. Although Heidegger resists the notion that his account is anthropological,34 his understanding of human beings as beings-in-the-­ world has important implications for what it means to be human. To say that we only have our being in and in relation to our immediate environment elevates the significance of what that environment is. If we are ‘being-theres’, then the ‘there’ part—where we find ourselves and who we find ourselves with—has a crucial bearing on our being, on our very humanity. On a basic level, this suggests that we are not isolated individuals, disconnected from the world, people, and things around us. We are always and forever beings in relation, connected together. We either enjoy that which we are connected to or suffer it. If the world of our experience, particularly our home, is a place of strife, then our being is affected. Creating positive environments is therefore more than just having a nice place to be: it has implications for our humanity and our ability to be and become who we are. The previous chapter began to explore Heidegger’s lecture, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’. We saw, in this lecture, Heidegger’s distinction between having a home and being at home, or dwelling in that home, and how the two are not synonymous. The lecture continues by exploring the relationship between dwelling (or being at home) and being human. 32  Heidegger, Martin. 1973. Being and Time. Trans. J.  Macquarrie and E.  Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, H57. 33  Heidegger. Being and Time, H60. 34  Heidegger. Being and Time, H17.

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

63

Heidegger states that we do not build in order to dwell, but rather, ‘to build, is really to dwell’.35 We do not build so that we might dwell, but rather we build because we are fundamentally dwellers; it is an overflow of who we already are as human beings. The essence of what it is to be a human being is to dwell, and therefore the problem of finding and being at home is not essential but existential: although dwelling is fundamental to being human (essence), we have forgotten how to dwell or do not know that dwelling is our essence (existential). The only way back for Heidegger is for humanity to remember how to dwell upon the Earth once again. If we are essentially dwellers, then being at home is an important part of what it means to be human. If dwelling or being at home is not our experience, then it would seem intuitive for us to seek out and find home places in which to be. This offers one interpretive lens for the activity of those at the drop-in: the young people and youth leaders have sought out a home together. It is also the case that if we are unable to be at home or find our home then we are unable to fulfil our humanity: we are dehumanised. We are unable to flourish and become fully who we are. Being at home is therefore part of what it means to be fully human, a project that is fundamental to every aspect of life. Becoming at home and becoming fully human are two sides of the same coin for Heidegger. Throughout this chapter, something important has emerged: stories of change, of young people becoming more fully themselves, as a consequence of the drop-in home. We saw the change in the young boy, described by James, who found his voice through participation in the positive environment and culture of the drop-in. We heard from Beth, who felt that the ‘family atmosphere’ and the relationships she built with others were key in her journey of healing from self-harm. We also heard from Shahid, who felt ‘stabilised’ in his being and that he had grown as a consequence of the safety that the drop-in provides. Given the connection drawn by Heidegger between becoming at home and becoming fully human, we can interpret these stories as journeys towards humanity as a consequence of becoming at home. These intentional elements of home are therefore fundamentally rehumanising.

 Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, 239–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 244. 35

64 

P. HILL

Conclusion A youth club is not necessarily an obvious place to find home. And yet, as has been demonstrated, the Youth Hub provides a source of home and family to the young people who are part of it. We have seen that the layout of the drop-in, and the way in which the physical environment is designed to reflect a home, is significant for the kind of relationship that the young people have built with it. We have also seen that the way in which the language of ‘home’ and ‘family’ was used by youth workers and young people not only named but shaped and reinforced this home. Many of the young people identified their relationships with youth workers and other young people as significant in creating a sense of home, as the consistency and care of those relationships were reflective of family. The practices or habits of the drop-in community also involved activities that were reflective and constructive of home, such as eating dinner together, celebrating birthdays, or simply being together. Finally, some of the young people, like Michael, appeared to feel ‘at home’ at the drop-in, feeling welcome and relaxed, feeling safe, and feeling that they can be themselves. Finding and creating home appears to be an intuitive project for this group of youth workers and young people, and a task that holds inherent meaning. Although it might be surprising that a youth club can be a home, it is not surprising—given everything explored in relation to Heidegger and dwelling being humanity’s essence—that they have sought out and created home. If home-making is part of our essence, creating home is an overflow of who we are. As Heidegger makes clear, we do not build in order to dwell, but build because we dwell. The fact that the drop-in community has created a home together reflects that they, and we, are homemakers by essence. The trouble comes, however, when we cannot find our way home. If that which enables us to find our home is rehumanising, then that which prevents us from finding our home or renders us homeless is dehumanising. As we saw in the previous chapter, having or finding home is no longer a given; there are multiple sociological, geographical, political, environmental, and technological factors that are compromising our ability to be at home in the world. If the findings of this chapter have shown us anything, it is that these factors are not just an onslaught on our home lives, but on our very humanity. If becoming at home is essential to becoming human, then homecoming may just be the task of humanity in the twenty-first century. Thankfully, these young people are showing us how.

3  MICHAEL: THE YOUTH CLUB HOME 

65

References Ahmed, Sara. 1999. Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–347. Atkinson, K., E.  Chico, and S.S.  Horn. 2016. Youth Work for Social Change: Preparing Individuals to Work with Youth in Diverse Urban Contexts. In The Changing Landscape of Youth Work: Theory and Practice for an Evolving Field, ed. K. Pozzoboni and B. Kirshner, 229–248. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. Blacker, Huw. 2010. Relationships, Friendships and Youth Work. In Youth Work Practice, ed. Tony Jeffs and Mark June Smith, 15–30. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brewer, John. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press. Collier, A., J.L. Phillips, and R. Iedema. 2015. The Meaning of Home at the End of Life: A Video-Reflexive Ethnography Study. Palliative Medicine 29 (8): 695–702. Davies, Bernard. 2015. Youth Work: A Manifesto for Our Times—Revisited. Youth and Policy 114: 96–117. de Botton, Alain. 2007. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin. Ford, David. 1997. The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press. Gates, Trevor. 2017. Chosen Families. In The Sage Encyclopedia of Marriage, Family, and Couples Counseling, ed. J.  Carlson and S.  Dermer, 240–242. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana. Ginsberg, Robert. 1999. Meditations on Homelessness and Being at Home: In the Form of a Dialogue. In The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. G. John and M. Abbarno, 29–40. Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Heidegger, Martin. 1973. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2011. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, 239–256. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, Barton. 2005. A Place to Call Home: After-School Programs for Urban Youth. Washington, DC; New York: Teachers College Press. Jeffs, Tony, and Mark K. Smith. 1999. The Problem of ‘Youth’ for Youth Work. Youth and Policy 62: 45–66. Mallett, Shelley. 2004. Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature. The Sociological Review 52 (1): 62–89. Moore, Barrington. 1984. Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

66 

P. HILL

Nash, Sally, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, and Bob Mayo. 2007. Raising Christian Consciousness: Creating Place. Journal of Youth and Theology 6 (2): 41–59. Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa. 2013. Exploring Young People’s and Youth Workers’ Experiences of Spaces for ‘Youth Development’: Creating Cultures of Participation. Journal of Youth Studies 17 (1): 26–41. Parsell, Cameron. 2010. Home Is Where the House Is: The Meaning of Home for People Sleeping Rough. Housing Studies 27 (2): 159–173. Pennycook, Alastair. 2004. Performativity and Language Studies. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 1 (1): 1–19. Ritchie, Daisy, and Jon Ord. 2016. The Experience of Open Access Youth Work: The Voice of Young People. Journal of Youth Studies 20 (3): 269–282. Robinson, Carole, Colin Reid, and Heather Cooke. 2010. A Home Away from Home: The Meaning of Home According to Families of Residents with Dementia. Dementia 9 (4): 490–508. Root, Andrew. 2007. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Sixsmith, Judith. 1986. The Meaning of Home: An Exploratory Study of Environmental Experience. Journal of Environmental Psychology 6 (4): 281–298. Skinner, Judith. 2010. Finding and Recognising Youth Workers. In Journeying Together: Growing Youth Work and Youth Workers in Local Communities, ed. A. Rogers and M.J. Smith, 40–51. Lyme Regis: Russell House Publishing. Spence, J., C.  Devanney, and K.  Noonan. 2006. Youth Work: Voices of Practice. Leicester: The National Youth Agency. Sudworth, Tim, Graham Cray, and Chris Russell. 2007. Mission-Shaped Youth: Rethinking Young People and Church. London: Church House Publishing. Wagner, David. 1993. The Family: No Haven. In Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community, ed. David Wagner, 45–66. Boulder; Oxford: Westview Press. Ward, Pete. 1997. Youthwork and the Mission of God: Frameworks for Relational Outreach. London: SPCK. Wardhaugh, Julia. 1999. The Unaccommodated Woman: Home, Homelessness and Identity. The Sociological Review 47: 91–109. Wells, Samuel. 2015. A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Willis, Paul. 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination. Oxford: Polity Press. Windsong, Elena Ariel. 2010. There Is No Place Like Home: Complexities in Exploring Home and Place Attachment. The Social Science Journal 47 (1): 205–214.

CHAPTER 4

Jonas: Home and Homelessness

Jonas: In the old building everyone was always together, we knew everyone, and everyone could engage with each other. I think we had, like, this family aspect. I think there was more engagement between leaders and young people. I still think there’s a lot now, but we did everything together. And now it’s more like, young people can kind of do things for themselves? Like play PlayStation or something. I don’t feel like that in this building, any more. I don’t know how the other young people might feel—they might have a different view. But in the old building I did, literally it was like, kind of like a family meeting kind of thing. Because we only had Wednesdays and Saturdays and I used to always go on Wednesdays. So we had like so many people, familiar faces, which you’re so close with, and you’re having dinner together—it feels like one big family meal kind of thing. It was so much more relaxed. It is now, but we could just like you know sit on the sofas or something and have a chat. You know, we’re not in a charity organisation building, we’re in a big house having fun over dinner. That kind of like, you know, that’s how it felt. […] I think my family is a bit disjointed. Because, first we moved here from Belarus. I don’t come—I’m not at home often, like I come out early and I come back late, for whatever I am doing. So it is always like—my dad comes back really late from work and goes straight to bed. My mum’s like doing shopping, or like, cleaning the house—maybe she’s just in the garden you know chilling. So it’s always like, everyone’s like, all over the place. We’re never together. So it’s kind of disjointed, you know? And even the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_4

67

68 

P. HILL

rest of my family, you know like, some of my family’s back in Belarus, some of my family is like here in England but we don’t even engage with them. So it’s kind of like, everybody’s all over the place—so I still feel happy at home, but it’s a different experience.

Nineteen-year-old Jonas is a shy, reflective type. He arrives at the dropi­n quietly, nodding and saying ‘hello’ to the leaders. He gets on with helping out in the kitchen or goes to the shops to get more milk when it is needed. He sometimes arrives early to meet with a member of the Youth Hub staff and sits with his headphones on until they are ready. Perhaps because English is not his native language or because of his thoughtful temperament, he speaks slowly and carefully. During my time at the drop­in, he always asked how I was and seemed genuine in wanting to know the answer. Jonas is one of the longest standing members at the drop-in. His time with the Youth Hub spanned an important move from one building to another, which had a significant impact on the numbers of young people attending the project. Before the move, average attendance was around 20 young people, whereas after, it was more like 200. Jonas has mixed feelings about the new space, which has enabled more young people to come but has also ultimately changed the environment. In this extract from Jonas’s interview, he makes several points which will prove important for our exploration of home. Firstly, he exhibits a nostalgic attachment to the former Youth Hub building, which, despite its unsuitability for the growing project, felt less like a ‘charity organisation building’ and more like ‘a big house’. Jonas also misses the closeness of the relationships and the ‘family’ feel he experienced in the previous building with the influx of new young people coming along and the way in which they ‘do things for themselves’ now, as opposed to always doing everything together. Both of these aspects suggest a level of attachment to the drop-in space. Secondly, it would seem that togetherness—time spent engaging face to face—is being displaced at the drop-in, something which Jonas attributes at least partly to the presence of technological devices. Thirdly, Jonas appears to experience home in several places, both at the drop-in and at his familial home, and experiences a complex mix of homeliness and unhomeliness in both locations. It is therefore not as straightforward as saying that we are either at home or homeless; we live with a complex tapestry of both home and homelessness across multiple locations. Although Jonas expresses home and family primarily as an experience that has been lost, it is something he wants to experience at the Youth

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

69

Hub. These two words, home and family, articulate the meaningfulness of the project to him. This chapter will interrogate what it means to be at home and the complexity of our home engagements. More specifically, it will explore the three elements highlighted by Jonas’s comments, namely attachment, technology, and the relationship between home and homelessness. Ethnographic studies such as this one aim to complexify the simple as, in Swinton and Mowat’s words, their purpose is to ‘render the familiar strange’.1 My conversations with young people made it clear that home is not a simple and easily graspable reality. It is complex and sometimes contradictory, and appears to ebb and flow as circumstances, environments, and relationships change. It is not always positive, and, as Robbie’s story in Chap. 2 revealed, can be easily undone.

Attachment The term ‘home’ attributes a particular kind of meaning or significance to a place or environment. Home can be found, as is evident through Jonas’s comments, in multiple places, all of which can engender attachment. In Barton Hirsch’s ethnographic study of an after-school club, the young people exhibited a ‘home-type attachment’ to the project. Hirsch argues that our place attachments, such as the one young people had with the club, are important for our identity and sense of self. It is such home-place attachments that provide, Hirsch elaborates, continuity for an individual over time, through the ups and downs of life. Hirsch concludes: A home-place, then, is not necessarily one’s familial home or place of residence. It is a place that is specified by the individual. A home-place provides a means for self-regulation and identity maintenance as well as empowerment. Appropriation of such a home, one that is linked to both the individual self and the community, may have special significance for urban youth living in poverty. […] A home is more than a place. If a space is transformed into a place through personal meaning, then a place is further transformed into a home through characteristics that imbue it with deeper personal significance.2 1   Swinton, J. and H.  Mowat. 2006. Practical Theology and Qualitative Research. Canterbury: SCM Press. 167. 2  Hirsch, Barton. 2005. A Place to Call Home: After-School Programs for Urban Youth. Washington, DC; New York: Teachers College Press. 44.

70 

P. HILL

Hirsch’s findings resonate deeply with my own, and the specific importance—from my ethnographic research and his—of a youth club home attachment for urban young people from a low socio-economic background. He also acknowledges, as does Jonas, that home does not belong exclusively to familial domains. It appears possible for home to be created in unlikely or surprising spaces. This may seem obvious, but it is nonetheless worth stating. Our familial residences may be dominant in our minds as we think of home, but it would seem that a broader understanding is needed. A youth club home may not be exactly the same as a familial home, and to call such a club a home does not suggest that it should seek to replicate familial home life. Rather, it is possible that a youth club is a home in a new and different way and can facilitate home-type attachments for those who need or want them. The other important aspect from Hirsch’s study is the depth of meaning accredited by the use of the term home to describe a place. More importantly, perhaps, this meaning is ‘specified by the individual’. The places we call home play a powerful role in our lives, as a source and a shaper of our identity. Our homes are places where we can be ourselves and where we let people in. As we let our guard down, our home places start to shape us. As Sara Ahmed explains, we do not simply inhabit spaces but are inhabited by them.3 There were others, in addition to Jonas, who demonstrated a deep level of attachment to the project. Seventeen-year-old Bryony was a regular at the drop-in and one of the young leaders who had a say in decision-­ making. In her interview, Bryony talked about the family type relationships she had with others at the drop-in and described her peers as ‘siblings’. We discussed the recent news that the drop-in would be changing imminently. Where the centre had been open every night after school for any young person who wanted to attend, it was moving towards specific age groups on specific nights, separating the younger (11–14) and older (15+) youth. Bryony was not happy about the changes and said that she had burst into tears when she heard about them. She said it was hard to move on when you feel ‘attached’ to something. After my interview with Bryony, I talked with the staff members who had made the decision to change the structure of the drop-in to get a sense of why they were moving in this direction. It turned out that several of the older ones 3  Ahmed, Sara. 1999. Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 3: 329–347 (341).

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

71

(including Bryony) were negatively influencing the younger youth. Where Bryony had only seen the positives of her relationships with younger peers at the drop-in, it seemed, from the perspective of the leaders at least, that there was more to the story. In this moment, I was able to transition backstage from the drop-in, to explore what was really going on from the leaders’ perspective.4 Whether or not the leaders were accurate in their estimation of Bryony’s influence, what this interaction revealed was that home—or in this case specifically family relationships—can be complex and contradictory. The level of attachment and the significance of the relationships formed can be both positive and negative. Family type relationships, given how much they mean to us, can influence us in a positive or negative direction. Home and family are therefore not inherently or intrinsically good; it is precisely because of the power of home over us that it can be a source of such pain and trauma in many lives. Home can therefore be detrimental if the powerful bonds formed influence an individual towards, for example, violence, drug use, or crime. Hirsch adds nuance here, suggesting cautious reception of his research findings lest they be considered as a ‘blanket endorsement’ of these kinds of settings. He continues: ‘No club is perfect and every family and home provides negative as well as positive experiences.’5 The places we choose to make our home will therefore influence us, one way or another. If a more positive home does not present itself, it is perhaps unsurprising that teenagers look to find home in less desirable places, with those who might offer it to them. This is often used as the rationale behind gang involvement, as the kinship bonds formed in gangs bring a sense of belonging, security, and family for those who may not experience them elsewhere.6 Although not always positive, Hirsch explains that a home is always ‘worth having’ as a place that is of intrinsic value.7 We all need to be at home somewhere, meaning that if no other homes are available to us, perhaps we would rather have a detrimental home than no home at all. The drop-in provides a positive home for those who may end up seeking out home in less nurturing places. The positivity of the drop-in 4  This is Wilkinson’s phrase, see Wilkinson, Catherine. 2017. Going ‘Backstage’: Observant Participation in Research with Young People. Children’s Geographies 15, 5: 614–620. 5  Hirsch. A Place to Call Home. 45. 6  For the debate on this issue, see Young, T., W. Fitzgibbon, and D. Silverstone. 2014. A Question of Family? Youth and Gangs. Youth Justice 14, 2: 171–185. 7  Hirsch. 53.

72 

P. HILL

environment is not guaranteed, however, and may well end up influencing young people in a negative way. Creating home with young people is therefore not enough. This home needs to be a good home, one that is managed well. This is particularly challenging in a context like the drop-in where the home is in some senses co-created; although the leaders talk about ‘setting culture’ to ensure the drop-in is a positive environment, like any open access youth work project, young people’s participation in the creation of a safe space is essential. This is because, as Ord emphasises, the youth work process incorporates all of the relationships between youth workers and young people, the peer-to-peer relationships, and the relationship a young person has with a provision as a whole.8 Creating this positive dynamic is a delicate dance between freedom and boundaries. The youth worker must curate the social and becoming relational world of a project, in the knowledge that all interactions may potentially have a positive or a negative impact on the young people who attend. The Youth Hub is not immune to these negative impacts. During my time at the drop-in, there was one major incident involving the police. In the regular Monday morning staff meeting, held after the event, the CEO relayed that eight of the young people from the drop-in had beaten up another young person back home on the estate where they lived. The incident happened outside of drop-in hours, but was a consequence of alliances formed within drop-in walls. The police were called, and one of the young people was excluded from school. The staff shared about how they had banned the eight young people from the drop-in for a period of two weeks but were hoping to reintegrate them after a series of mentoring sessions. Although the relationships formed between these eight young people may have appeared beneficial, they had also manifested in negative ways back home. Bringing together vulnerable young people from different backgrounds can prove challenging, and it is perhaps the young people who need the provision the most who are the most vulnerable to these negative impacts. Although the intention is that the drop-in is available for all young people, some shier young people may find it too daunting an atmosphere, given the nature of the young people who attend. Day to day, there are social dramas and bust ups, and much of the time spent at the drop-in is taken up with negotiating between young people who have 8  Ord, Jon. 2007. Youth Work Process, Product and Practice: Creating an Authentic Curriculum in Work with Young People. Lyme Regis: Russell House. 54.

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

73

fallen out. The social world of the drop-in is turbulent and fluctuating, presenting challenging waters for the staff to steer a course through. It is also important to re-emphasise here that not all of the young people found a home at the drop-in. There were varying degrees of loyalty and engagement at the drop-in, and not all related to it as Jonas did. Simply offering a home space is therefore no guarantee that young people will feel at home there. As explored in Chap. 2 in relation to Heidegger, simply having a home is not the same as being-at-home. The same physical location can therefore evoke qualitatively different experiences in each of us. Davison and Milbank make the case that offering a space is not enough; we must create place with young people, taking seriously the ‘coordinates’ that orient their existence. The authors write: Our situatedness means more than being rooted in a community but also involves mappings of the ways in which knowledge and power operate in trajectories, as any child who has had to negotiate a safe way home from school will understand. It does not mean merely being at home in the world, but having a set of co-ordinates by which to understand its complexity and injustice, its fears and terrors.9

For young people like Robbie, the coordinates that orient his existence are more complex, unjust, and filled with more terrors than most. I never discovered why Robbie ended up living with his uncle. But he had clearly been hurt by the people in his life and struggled to open up and trust others. His life is oriented by the pains and injustices he has experienced, and all of this comes to bear on his ability to be at home in the world and at the Youth Hub. Offering a space to be is just one part of the picture when it comes to walking young people home; we must offer them new mappings, new trajectories, and more hopeful coordinates through which to orient their lives. In her interview, Bryony expressed her dissatisfaction with the changes at the drop-in using the language of attachment. For the young people who spend up to two and a half hours each day, five days a week at the drop-in, it plays a significant role in their lives. It is an important piece in the fabric of their existence, along with school or college and time at home. It is a place that is not only enjoyed but in some cases relied upon. 9  Davison, A. and A.  Milbank. 2010. For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions. London: SCM Press. 190.

74 

P. HILL

There was sometimes genuine concern expressed by young people as they headed into holiday breaks, knowing that the drop-in would be closed and feeling unsure of how they would spend their time. As Shahid mentioned in the previous chapter, attending the drop-in can be a self-preservation strategy for some young people, a deliberate and intentional act to protect themselves from making bad decisions elsewhere. It was often during the holiday breaks while the drop-in was closed that eventful things would happen in the young peoples’ lives. Charlotte was a case in point. For Charlotte, the drop-in was the main—and at times the only—structured activity she participated in; she did not attend college, have a job, or particularly enjoy being at home. During school holidays she would spend her time hanging around town. On two occasions during the holiday breaks she ran away from home and became known to the police and social services as a consequence. The drop-in is the only building block in her life and the only place she attends regularly. I had a few conversations with staff members about Charlotte, and they expressed concern about what she was going to do when she reached 18. They felt challenged to get the balance right between providing a supportive and consistent environment for her, while also ensuring that her attachment to the provision was healthy. They did not want her to become dependent on the provision, which would not be available to her when she grew too old for it. They therefore tried to encourage Charlotte to apply for jobs, to stick out her college course, to seek out work experience opportunities, and even to attend other youth work projects in addition to the Youth Hub. Like any other home, it is therefore normal for young people to move on when they reach a certain age. Youth work is intentionally targeted at young people, and although this title is sometimes used to describe those up to 30, its focus tends to be teenagers. Young people who had grown too old for the drop-in were welcome to pop back in or come to visit to say hello to staff and to the other young people. But the drop-in is run on the premise that once you are too old, you can no longer come. A healthy home in the context of the Youth Hub is therefore one that you can move on from, rather than depend on. The Youth Hub home is one that points beyond itself, perhaps with the aim of enabling young people to find home in other places. This suggests a different kind of attachment to one that young people may build in their familial homes; it is only ever a home for a short period of time, and the relationships are bound to a particular period of life. However, it was not uncommon for young people to follow

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

75

the youth leaders to churches and other groups where they could continue to stay relationally connected. It was therefore possible, in some cases, for the relationships and attachments to continue on beyond the youth work context.

Technology In Chap. 2 we began to explore the ways in which technology, according to Heidegger, is changing our way of being-in-the-world and compromising our ability to find home. Although Heidegger was not writing about technology as we now know it, given that he died 40  years before the advent of the smartphone, the essence of Heidegger’s argument—that technology can change our way of being-in-the-world unless we are thoughtful of it—seems to resonate with Jonas’s experience. On a micro level, Jonas highlights the way in which technological devices are impacting young peoples’ engagement with the drop-in. The old Youth Hub building was like a rabbit-warren, with narrow corridors and rooms leading on from one another. Located above a shop in a slim town house, the building was long and thin with windy passageways and cramped spaces. The drop-in was one of the larger rooms at the back, with a red leather sofa and café bar. There was a TV hung on the wall and speakers that would blare out music, but there were no other technological devices to be seen. There was also a pool table and table football cramped onto a mezzanine floor above. The space was small, but the intention was clear: young people attended the drop-in to sit on the ginormous sofa, to chat over the bar as they drank milkshakes, and to play board games. In the new building, however, the main room alone has eight screens: PlayStation screens, computer screens, and laptop screens. This means that some young people attend the drop-in primarily to sit on these screens. Although they may have to take turns, they will sit and watch others play Fortnite or FIFA until it’s their turn again. In some ways this is positive, as these young people may not attend the drop-in if these resources were not available to them. They still spend time chatting with leaders and peers while they play console games. As Jonas highlights, however, this changes the dynamic and the level of ‘togetherness’ young people may experience in the space. The other ever-present technological device at the drop-in is smartphones. It is not uncommon to see young people sitting alone for the

76 

P. HILL

whole of a drop-in session, glued to a wall where their phone is being charged. The drop-in is—in these cases—just a handy place to sit while they charge their phone, rather than a place to engage with the youth leaders or activities on offer. Phones also seemed to be a point of contention, as arguments would follow on from young people taking each other’s phones, breaking (or being blamed for breaking) each other’s phones, or buying them off each other. Some of the young people I met at the drop­in owned several phones, in case something should happen to one. In one particularly significant interaction, I was standing with youth leader Ben in the kitchen. Sixteen-year-old Lena walked through to where we were making drinks. The music was so loud in the kitchen that I could hardly hear what Ben was saying. Lena had her earphones in and was mouthing along to the lyrics of the music she was listening to. Ben asked her something, and she turned towards him, starting to exaggerate her mouthing of the lyrics and hip hop dancing in response. She moonwalked—or attempted to moonwalk, which made us laugh—back out of the kitchen the way that she came in. In this moment, it was like Lena was in her own world. We were listening to one piece of music, while she was listening to another. We were physically in the same space, but perhaps not ‘together’, to use Jonas’s term. She engaged with us, in some sense, but did not respond. This is perhaps one of the most significant differences between Hirsch’s study of after-school clubs, conducted 14 years ago, and mine. The world has changed significantly in that time. The introduction of digital technology, and the relatively universal presence of smartphones in people’s pockets, has altered life monumentally. The impact of this on our ability to find and be at home cannot be understated. Smartphones have crept into the most intimate spaces of our lives and enable us to be in multiple places at once. In a staggeringly prophetic statement, Heidegger suggests that technology can leave us ‘nowhere and everywhere’.10 How true this feels of our smartphone use. Lena was present at the drop-in, but was also present to the music she was listening to and the world available through her smartphone screen. She was half in one place, with us, and half in another. To say this is just a youth issue is untrue; we are all swimming in the technological soup to varying degrees. I saw several leaders on their phones 10  Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Turning. In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 36–49. Trans. W.  Lovitt. New  York; Hagerstown; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row. 43.

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

77

during drop-in hours, even though they were not supposed to be. It is so instinctual that we do not even notice we are doing it. The proliferation of smartphones at the drop-in presents other challenges. The drop-in was originally launched with the aim of keeping vulnerable young people off the streets and safe from risky behaviours and harm. The drop-in walls offered physical protection and a place of refuge from outside forces. It is not as easy to keep young people safe in this way anymore. On one evening at the drop-in, I was chatting with a 16-year-­ old. During our conversation, her phone was bleeping incessantly, as message after message poured through. It turned out that these messages were coming from someone she knew from a previous school. She had left the school a year or two back, but this person still contacted her. She showed me one of the messages. It read: ‘I hate you why don’t you just die’. The 16-year-old brushed it off, shrugging and saying that she was used to it. I suggested she block the person, or turn off her phone, but she did not want to. Perhaps negative contact is better than the social death of no contact at all. Even if young people are physically ‘safe’ at the drop-in, youth leaders can no longer protect them from harmful outside influences. The drop-in can no longer offer the refuge it once did, as cyberbullies, and the harmful messages they send, travel with a young person inside the youth club walls. There is another, broader way in which technology may be compromising the drop-in home. In Chap. 2, Heidegger’s distinctive understanding of technology, and particularly his focus on the essence of technology, rather than technological devices, was explored. This essence—Enframing, or the Frame—is far more all-consuming than a smartphone: it is the lens through which we begin to view the whole of life. Rather than receiving the world as it is, and letting things be as they are, this technological lens projects everything as a resource for our manipulation and use. Everything is swept up into this frame, which begins to shape how things can come to be in the world. There are ways in which this technological frame may have seeped into our understanding and practice of youth work. During my time at the drop-in, this appeared to play out in the tension between structured and unstructured work. The drop-in is predominantly a free space in which young people can come and go as they please, and do what they like. It is truly ‘open’ in the way that open access youth work must be by definition. One of the challenges facing such open access youth work projects is funding. It is challenging to fund provisions like the drop-in, as evidencing

78 

P. HILL

impact is more complicated than with targeted projects. Maintaining a nightly drop-in is expensive and requires long-term resourcing. The Youth Hub drop-in receives a combination of grants and donations, and has to spend a huge amount of time seeking out new funding streams and making the case for ongoing support. Occasionally, funding may be given for a more specific project within the overall drop-in provision. In one instance, funding was secured to run a series of sessions during drop-in hours on the theme of ‘raising aspirations’. Although the youth workers were open to running these sessions, my perception was that it was an indirect way of bringing in new funding streams for the drop-in. I was present for the first of these workshops, carried out on consecutive Thursday evenings. The team decided that to run these sessions they would have to close the drop-in, so that if young people stayed, they would be staying solely for the workshop. At five o’ clock, youth worker Grace started to walk through the space, announcing to the young people that the workshop would be starting soon. Young people began to gather up their bags and make their way to the door. Grace tried to convince them to stay, selling the activities with the prospect of a prize. They continued to pack up, and before long, only 5 out of around 30 young people remained. It was unsurprising that it was the core young people who stayed—those who had good relationships with the leaders, rather than those who most needed their aspirations ‘raised’. There was a strange silence that descended over the normal hubbub of activity in the drop-in, as the young people sat down obediently around a table and listened to what Grace had to say. There was a shift in the dynamic of power in the space at this moment: what began as an open youth work session, with young people choosing when to stay and go and retaining an element of choice, became a targeted provision with the youth leaders establishing the conditions by which young people might stay. This, for me, felt like a clear example of the way in which youth work is susceptible to Heidegger’s technological frame. With the backdrop of a decade of austerity cuts in youth work spending, organisations are increasingly pressured to measure the outcomes of their work and evidence its impact to compete for funding. This in turn has brought about a shift to more targeted forms of youth work across the board.11 Tania de St Croix argues that evaluation is therefore performative, as it not only shapes but 11  Ritchie, Daisy, and Jon Ord. 2016. The Experience of Open Access Youth Work: The Voice of Young People. Journal of Youth Studies 20, 3: 269–282.

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

79

restricts the nature of work offered.12 In performative systems, evaluation does not simply capture an existing phenomenon but starts to change it. For example, school exams began as a way of testing what students have learnt over a particular year, ranking them according to ability. Exams are an example of a performative system, however, as over time learning has been directed towards achievement in exams; children no longer learn for learning’s sake, but rather to do well in their exams. The same can be said of youth work. The more pressure is put on measuring the outcomes of youth work, the more youth workers are forced to pitch and deliver projects that will secure funding bids on the basis of these tangible outcomes. Thus the funding, as de St Croix identified, starts to shape and restrict what is possible. In the example given above with Grace and her aspirations workshop, it is clear to see how over time, the drop-in could cease to contain any element of openness at all, if all of the funding is for shortterm targeted provision. The drop-in will eventually be squeezed into a targeted mould, through the nature of available funding and the expectations of what youth work is and should be. Why might this be described as a technologising of youth work? In his compelling book, Unframing Existence, Zohar Atkins broadens out Heidegger’s thinking on technology to suggest an acutely modern way of thinking about the world. This modern way of looking at the world is dominated by a desire for security and calculated order.13 It is an obsession with measuring and evaluating and dividing up the world into neat and graspable chunks. We cannot escape this technologically motivated way of life, nor should we. Rather, Atkins suggests that instead of denying the need for standardisation and measurement, we must also desire and celebrate ‘that which is nonstandard, non-calculable, and non-conceptual to come to presence within our standardized [sic] metaphysical world’, acknowledging the ‘creaks, the questions, and difficulties’ that give—in this case, youth work—its depth.14 Building on Heidegger’s exploration of the poetic, Atkins suggests that we must recapture a way of living poetically in the world. Poetry has a way of resisting reduction, as each word is full of meaning and interpretable in a multitude of ways. Poetry is an art 12  de St Croix, Tania. 2018. Youth Work, Performativity and the New Youth Impact Agenda: Getting Paid for Numbers? Journal of Education Policy 33, 3: 414–438. 13  Atkins, Zohar. 2018. An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity: Unframing Existence. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 31. 14  Atkins. Unframing Existence. 145–152.

80 

P. HILL

form, and like art, is in opposition to a purely scientific way of thinking about meaning and the world. The poetic way, according to Atkins, ‘would not lift us out of the world, or offer us a way out of modern metaphysics, but it would enable us to be in the world and to inhabit institutions determined by the logic of metaphysics, in a freer way’.15 Returning to the problem of youth work, Atkins’s thinking has important implications. Atkins pinpoints the problem of youth work in our time as the desire for calculation, security, and order, which is changing and undermining the nature of youth work provisions. This is a symptom of the acutely modern way of thinking about the world that Atkins identifies, building on Heidegger. The only way forward is to find the poetic within the technological: to champion that which is non-calculable and enable it to come to presence. In the context of the Youth Hub, this non-calculable element may be the home created at the drop-in. Such a home cannot be measured. Its impact cannot be quantified. However, we have seen that it is important for the young people who attend. It is a home that must be defended, as the pressure towards measuring and adapting the provision to meet the needs of funders is strong. There is a need to embrace this poetic way of thinking about youth work and carve a pathway through the standardisation and measuring. This poetic way feels close to a theological way of thinking about youth work, although Heidegger and Atkins may intend them differently. They are at least united in what they stand against: a solely and reductively calculative way of thinking that is undermining the richness, the beauty, and the sometimes indefinable significance of youth work.

Home and Homelessness This chapter has explored some of the changes affecting the drop-in on a micro and macro level, and the way in which Jonas experienced those changes. It may be common to associate home with feelings of stability and rootedness, and the sense of an unchanging presence in our lives. This provokes the question: can our homes change? Or does any form of change lead to a dissolution of that home, and ultimately to homelessness? Jonas’s comments illuminate how the changes at the drop-in impacted his experience of family. Jonas used the term ‘together’ ten times in his interview. For Jonas, it seems that togetherness is what constitutes a home and  Atkins. 132.

15

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

81

family, and is also what has been lost at the drop-in. Jonas also used the term ‘disjointed’ to describe his familial home, suggesting something quite different; where togetherness, for Jonas, is about a high level of engagement and doing ‘everything together’, disjointed describes being ‘all over the place’ and ‘never together’. These two terms—together and disjointed—expressed Jonas’s home and family feeling, and the loss of it. To say that Jonas no longer feels at home in any way at the drop-in is perhaps unmerited. Rather, he appears to exhibit a complex mix of homeliness and unhomeliness in both home locations. This would suggest that home and homelessness are not contrasting opposites, and that it is not as simple as saying that Jonas does or does not experience home at the drop­in; in some ways he might experience home and in other ways he may not. The same is true of his family home. He undoubtedly relates to his familial home as a home, even if it feels a bit disjointed sometimes. Sara Ahmed reaches a similar conclusion in her research of migrant communities. Ahmed questions the notion of home as ‘fixed’, and the subsequent articulations of loss as a consequence of moving on from this location.16 Through her research she highlights a pattern of discourse around migration which expresses home in negative terms: as what it is not, of the loss of home through migration and exile. This negative definition of home contributes to the notion of home as a fixed point, establishing home and the foreign in a relationship of opposition, with the result that they are ultimately irreconcilable to one another. Ahmed contends, in contrast to this, that home can never be ‘pure’ or uncontaminated by movement, but that home involves both home and away. In fact, ‘[t]here is movement and dislocation within the very forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance’.17 Homes always contain both of these elements, home and away. This adds further weight to the notion that Jonas can still experience home at the drop-in, even if he also experiences away-ness. The drop-in home is not and will never be pure and uncontaminated, and therefore a young person’s experience of it will involve feelings of both home and away. Homes like the drop-in are ‘complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance’, and may fluctuate and change over time. This change does not necessarily undermine their ability to offer home, but rather requires that we understand home beyond the limits of boundaries and fixity.  Ahmed. Home and Away.  Ahmed. 340.

16 17

82 

P. HILL

To tease out the connection between home and away further, we will turn once again to Heidegger. Heidegger’s 1942 lecture ‘The Ister’ is a poetic exploration of Hölderlin’s hymn of the same name, with home and unhomeliness being the central themes. In ‘The Ister’, Heidegger establishes a logic of home and its relationship to foreignness. This logic is that the homely and the unhomely are connected, as the latter is present in the former.18 Rather than being contrasting opposites, the unhomely is contained within the concept of the homely. Home and the unhomely therefore exist in a pair relation:19 you cannot have one without the other, as each is what it is only in relation to the other. Home and the unhomely are different to one another, but cannot be articulated without reference to the other; to know what it is to be at home, you must also know what it is to not be at home, and vice versa. Other examples of paired relations exist in Heidegger’s work, such as life and death and being and nothingness,20 lending weight to my suggestion that home and the unhomely are also paired in his work. In each of these examples, the notyet of the latter already exists in the former, as a possibility that may yet come to pass. This perspective on home helps to interpret Jonas’s experiences at the drop-in. Jonas articulates a range of different feelings about the drop-in and his family, and experiences a mixture of homeliness and unhomeliness in both locations. Jonas describes how he used to feel at home in the drop­in, and how it was like a family, and reflects nostalgically on his former years at the Youth Hub. Given that home contains the unhomely within itself—according to Heidegger’s paired definition—Jonas’s experiences of the unhomely do not necessarily mean, simplistically, that he is no longer at home. Instead, they might suggest that he knows what it is to be at home, even if this is not his current reality. He also desires to be at home at the Youth Hub. This desire is indicative of the move from the unhomely to the homely, as Heidegger writes: ‘Being unhomely is no mere deviance from the homely, but rather the converse: a seeking and searching out the homely, a seeking that at times does not know itself.’21 18  Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. 69. 19  Adams, Nicholas. 2013.The Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 9. 20  See Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. H243. 21  Heidegger. The Ister. 74.

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

83

An initial assumption may have been that Jonas’s experience is negative. There are certainly ways in which staff members could take on board Jonas’s comments and implement strategies to recapture the family feeling of togetherness in the drop-in space. But there is also a sense in which Jonas’s experiences indicate an authentic home engagement. Jonas will soon be leaving the Youth Hub, and if he knows what it is to truly be at home, maybe he can find home elsewhere. In this way, the Youth Hub will be a home that Jonas can move on from, and one that points beyond itself. It may seem counterintuitive to say that someone can be at home and not at home at the same time, and can be at home while also journeying. Heidegger recognises how incompatible or nonsensical these two aspects seem when brought together.22 Yet he employs the metaphor of a river to capture how it may be possible, as a river embodies both dwelling and movement. The river is at home with itself, according to Heidegger, while also journeying towards its ultimate home and end destination. A river is a whole stable entity and yet also contains movement within itself. It is determined by where it is going, its end and ultimate home, but also has a locality that is not its end. The pilgrimage home, the homecoming venture, is like a river moving forwards into the future. Always connected to and determined by the home that is not yet, humanity may still find its dwelling in the midst of the motion forwards and journeying. There is something powerful that exists at the intersection of movement and stability, of journeying and dwelling.23 It is in the liminal space between the homely and the unhomely that homecoming comes to be. This notion feels theologically significant. If the drop-in is a home that points beyond itself then it is not an end destination: the young people journey with the drop-in for a number of years but will inevitably move on. Perhaps it is therefore not a static kind of home that the Youth Hub offers—or should offer to young people—but rather an invitation to a journey of homecoming. If it is a home that points only to itself, it may well fail to facilitate a young person’s journey forwards and lead to dependency and unhealthy attachment. In Nordin’s words, youth clubs like the Youth Hub may offer a ‘way station along a way’, a pit stop or dwelling  Heidegger. The Ister. 33.  Todres, L. and K.  Galvin. 2010. ‘Dwelling-mobility’: An Existential Theory of Wellbeing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being 5, 3: 1–6. 22 23

84 

P. HILL

place on their journey home.24 It may also be a home that opens up a pathway to finding and becoming at home with God, something which shall be picked up in later chapters.

Conclusion The home at the Youth Hub drop-in, like any home, is complex, contested, and at times contradictory. The home at the drop-in can fluctuate and shift with time, and the young people’s experience of home depends on a web of interconnected factors. As Jonas’s comments make clear, we can experience a mixture of homely and unhomely feelings towards our homes and can create home attachments in multiple different places, including in surprising spaces like youth clubs. It has also become apparent that home is not an intrinsic good, as our homes—due to the intimate relationship and attachments we form with them and the people in them— can influence us negatively or positively. It does seem, however, that a home place is something special and worth having, even if it is not always positive. Jonas still craved a home experience at the drop-in, even though aspects of his more recent experience were negative, and even though he did not experience much togetherness at home. In the case of the drop-in, it was evidently a home that some of the young people relied on. To call a place a home is not a casual designator, one handed out willy-nilly. It betrays a deep level of attachment to a place, an attachment which must be managed carefully by the youth workers. Curating this home environment which is in some senses co-created, and can only be relied upon for a specific season of a young person’s life, presents challenges to the staff. There also appear to be new challenges undermining the home reality at the drop-in. The world has changed dramatically over the last ten years and technological devices have found their ways into the intimate corners of our lives. The fact that every person has (at least) one mobile phone in their pocket at all times changes the dynamic of the drop-in space, and the level of togetherness, to borrow Jonas’s term, possible. In a wider sense, the current climate of youth work funding has created pressure to evidence impact through tangible outcomes, a context that is proving devastating for open access youth work; I suggested this was a technologising of youth 24  Nordin, Irene Gilsenan. 2002. ‘A Way-Station Along a Way’: Heaney and Heidegger and Wanderings and Home. Nordic Irish Studies 1: 19–29.

4  JONAS: HOME AND HOMELESSNESS 

85

work more broadly, according to Heidegger’s use of the term. The only way forward, as Atkins highlights, is to allow that which is non-­calculable to come to presence within the demands for the calculable. Creating home is costly and its impact immeasurable. And yet it is what the young people at this drop-in find important and meaningful about it. We must find ways to resist youth work collapsing solely into that which is fundable, and defend the good, the beautiful, the poetic, and the theological where we identify it. The complex relationship between home and homelessness was interrogated further with reference to Heidegger’s metaphor of a river. Exploring the dynamic of home and homelessness revealed that to talk of being ‘at home’ may be too static, failing to consider the way in which all homes point beyond themselves. To talk of pilgrimage is too fluid, failing to take account of the way in which we genuinely find and become at home in concrete locations. The truth is somewhere in between, somewhere in the midst of both the homely and the unhomely; that we are coming to be at home, and live in the now and the not-yet of that reality. Homecoming also acknowledges the home that is coming, and through which all of the present homes and dwelling places find their ultimate end and meaning. As we end this chapter with Heidegger, we are teetering on the edge of theology. Let us turn then to the second half of the book, and to Bonhoeffer, fleshing out the theological picture further.

References Adams, Nicholas. 2013. The Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Ahmed, Sara. 1999. Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–347. Atkins, Zohar. 2018. An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity: Unframing Existence. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Davison, A., and A. Milbank. 2010. For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions. London: SCM Press. de St Croix, Tania. 2018. Youth Work, Performativity and the New Youth Impact Agenda: Getting Paid for Numbers? Journal of Education Policy 33 (3): 414–438. Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1977. The Turning. In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 36–49, Trans. W.  Lovitt. New  York; Hagerstown; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row. ———. 1996. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

86 

P. HILL

Hirsch, Barton. 2005. A Place to Call Home: After-School Programs for Urban Youth. Washington, DC; New York: Teachers College Press. Nordin, Irene Gilsenan. 2002. ‘A Way-Station Along a Way’: Heaney and Heidegger and Wanderings and Home. Nordic Irish Studies 1: 19–29. Ord, Jon. 2007. Youth Work Process, Product and Practice: Creating an Authentic Curriculum in Work with Young People. Lyme Regis: Russell House. Ritchie, Daisy, and Jon Ord. 2016. The Experience of Open Access Youth Work: The Voice of Young People. Journal of Youth Studies 20 (3): 269–282. Swinton, J., and H. Mowat. 2006. Practical Theology and Qualitative Research. Canterbury: SCM Press. Todres, L., and K.  Galvin. 2010. ‘Dwelling-mobility’: An Existential Theory of Well-Being. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-­ Being 5 (3): 1–6. Wilkinson, Catherine. 2017. Going ‘Backstage’: Observant Participation in Research with Young People. Children’s Geographies 15 (5): 614–620. Young, T., W. Fitzgibbon, and D. Silverstone. 2014. A Question of Family? Youth and Gangs. Youth Justice 14 (2): 171–185.

CHAPTER 5

Shahid: A Christian Home

It’s time for the leaders meeting before drop-in, and so we congregate around the dining table as normal. Several of the young leaders have joined for the meeting today, including Beth, Shahid and Aaminah. Freya starts to explain the plan: ‘Today we are going to do something new. We are going to try a new discussion activity, and go in at the deep end! While we are eating we are going to have a discussion over our food. The big question for today is: Is God real? Yes, no or maybe. The young people will go into different rooms depending on what they think, and have a discussion in there. Then as a group, you will come up with the one main reason why you think as you do. We really want to hear what the young people think, without pressure to think one way.’ After Freya has finished speaking, Aaminah says that she wants to go in the no group so that she can ‘persuade’ everyone that God exists. James challenges her, explaining that we aren’t trying to persuade people, just to hear what they think and have a genuine discussion. There’s a short time of prayer, before the meeting ends, and drop-in opens. Freya is the main cook tonight, and I am on duty with Shahid to help. We walk through to the kitchen and get out the large pans to cook risotto. Freya takes out the bacon and mushrooms from the fridge. Aaminah asks if there’s any Halal meat, and Freya says no. She says that Aaminah can have the vegetarian version, which she wrinkles her nose at. Two girls run through the kitchen and Freya shouts after them, ‘No running in the kitchen!’ She is wearing her apron, and I am struck by how domestic the scene is. As is normal on a Wednesday, young people are keen © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_5

87

88 

P. HILL

to know what’s for dinner. Many of them have never had risotto before and don’t know what it is. Lots of them ask about dessert. One of the young leaders hasn’t ever eaten a mushroom. There seems to be some commotion in the other room, so I tell Freya to go and see what’s happening while we carry on cooking. Shahid and I stir the risotto pans on the hob as they look like they are burning; there is quite a lot of brown at the bottom where it has singed. I ask Shahid directly how he feels about the prayer times before drop-in: ‘If you don’t mind me asking, how do you find it being a Muslim and a young leader among lots of Christians, when they pray and things?’ ‘No not at all, that’s fine,’ he replies. ‘I like praying, and it’s good to thank God. It’s also good to learn about other faiths—I’m really interested in learning more about Jesus and knowing more about what Christians believe.’ ‘That’s great to hear’, I reply. […] When it comes to dinner time, all of the young people and leaders are shepherded into the kitchen. Given the big island in the middle of the room, there isn’t much space as everyone is crammed in. Youth worker Freya explains that we are going to do something different today, and that once we have got our food we will then move to a different room to eat, depending on which discussion we want to be part of. ‘So today’s question for discussion is: is there a God? If you think yes, I want you to go to the quiet room with James. If you think maybe there is or maybe there isn’t then I want you to sit around the dining table with me. And if you think there isn’t I want you to go into the living room with Miriam. Does that make sense?’ I expect there to be grunts and eye rolls around the room, but am surprised to see that most of the young people accept the idea. In fact, the only comment made is by one young person who says that the quiet room will be full. Freya continues: ‘Right we are going to say grace before we eat, so shut your eyes’. I shut my eyes and slowly open one of them again, just to see if the young people have shut theirs. I am amazed to see that most of the young people have. I close mine again. I can hear one young person whispering behind me, and their friend whispers back, ‘shut up man, the lady’s prayin’!’. Freya prays: ‘Father God, thank you for this food that we are about to eat. Would you bless our conversations now, and the food to our bodies. In Jesus’s name, Amen.’ The young people shout, ‘Amen!’, before surging forwards to grab a plate and some food.

Eighteen-year-old Shahid is another long-standing member at the Youth Hub. Like Jonas, he is often found helping out around the kitchen

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

89

or making himself useful. He first started attending the Youth Hub when he was out of school for a while and had nothing else to do. He’d been taken out of school to emigrate with his family to Iran, but ended up returning with his mum to the UK. His friend Aaminah invited him along to the Youth Hub and he’s been coming ever since—attending drop-in, short-term projects, fundraising events, and summer camps. Both Shahid and Aaminah identify as Muslim. Although the Youth Hub is explicitly Christian, Shahid and Aaminah have found a home at the drop-in. They are young leaders, meaning that they hold responsibilities on various evenings. They participate in the full range of activities offered, including Christian ones like prayer and worship. Building on the conversation I had with Shahid over the risotto pots, I was able to ask him a further question in his interview about how it felt to be a Muslim young leader at a Christian project: Shahid:

To be honest, I thought I would feel really left out, and like on the side because I’m a Muslim or something like that—that’s how I used to think. It’s completely not like that—the whole organisation is so welcoming and stuff and like, they bring you all together no matter what race or religion you are, all equal people. […] They never force it on people. They just like—if people want to learn about, you can learn about the Christian beliefs and stuff. There’s nothing ever forced onto people. And yeah, it’s just like, people can come here, relax, but they don’t really need to get—like ‘you have to say a prayer’ or ‘you have to read the Bible’. You just don’t have to do that kind of stuff here. […] It kind of like… makes me think about my own religion more. ‘Cause there’s a lot of things I don’t actually do, like I don’t pray, I try to, I don’t pray as much as I should. So every time I come here, it makes me feel closer to God—in a way. I feel like—these people, they really care about God, and maybe I should do that too. That’s how I feel when I come here.

Shahid’s comments do not fit into a neat theological box. They defy the categories of how we may typically understand Christian youth work. They embrace the complexity of being a Christian provision that seeks to make a place for young people of all backgrounds and beliefs. And they force us to pause and ask what it is that makes this drop-in a ‘Christian’ one. If the aim, simplistically, is to make young people Christians, then in Shahid’s case it has failed. However, there is more to be uncovered here

90 

P. HILL

about what it means to do Christian youth work in a multicultural setting and how to interpret the Youth Hub’s activities with young people of all and no faiths in a theological dimension.

Raising Christian Consciousness For many young people who attend the drop-in, it is simply a place to hang out and meet with friends. For the core group of young people, the 10–15 who attend most regularly and know the staff well, it is more than just that. The faith of the Youth Hub is a key part of their experience, and some choose to explore Christianity further. This was not always straightforward or clean cut, as we see with Shahid. But there was an awareness of the Christian faith of the workers, a level of participation in the Christian activities offered, and potentially a decision to investigate Christian faith for themselves. Along with Shahid, two other core young people we have already met shared their faith journeys with me: Michael and Jonas. Like Shahid, they had both been involved with the Youth Hub for the majority of their teenage years. Unlike Shahid, both identified as a Christian as a consequence of their involvement with the drop-in, despite their different starting points. In Michael’s interview, I asked him directly about the Christian nature of the Youth Hub: Phoebe: Are you aware that the Youth Hub is a Christian organisation? Michael: Yes. Phoebe: What do you think it means that the Youth Hub is a Christian organisation? Michael: It means that they obviously believe in the Christian faith, and that they want, obviously, the young people to kind of be respectful to that. If they can, like, maybe even follow if they want to. Phoebe: And, if you don’t mind saying, would you call yourself a Christian? Michael: Yeah. Phoebe: Yeah? Michael: I became a Christian because of the Youth Hub. Michael was not brought up in a Christian family. Through participation at the drop-in day by day, attending other activities at the Youth Hub, having conversations with staff, and even attending a Christian youth group outside of the Youth Hub, he had decided to become a Christian.

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

91

He attended, along with Shahid and others, a Christian summer camp and relayed to me the story of his finger being healed miraculously on the trip. In the introduction, I outlined the influential study of Christian community-­based youth groups carried out by Collins-Mayo et al. Their research revealed that the majority of the young people in the groups studied continued on in the faith of their families and that they did little to foster faith among young people not from Christian families.1 Although this may well be true of the Youth Hub in a broad sense, in Michael’s case, it is not. Michael’s story also resonates with Thompson’s defence of Christian youth clubs, as she analyses the ways in which young people move from one sort of Christian youth work (the drop-in) to another more faith-focused space (the Christian youth group).2 Again, in Michael’s case, this happened as described, as he followed a drop-in leader to another Christian group they were running at their church. Where relationships are consistent, it does seem that these transitions can and do happen. In Michael’s case, this transition was a key step in his faith journey and the discovery of Christian faith for himself. In a comparable case, 19-year-old Jonas described himself as a Christian and attributed his faith to involvement with the Youth Hub. However, unlike Michael, Jonas was brought up in a traditional Christian home. In his interview, he explained more about the journey of faith he had been on during his time at the drop-in: Jonas: I was raised as a Christian, because in Belarus we have a lot of Catholics and Christians. So yeah I was always like Christian, but for me it was always like, I never really believed it, it was kind of forced on me. And at some point I was really upset with God, I was like, I don’t want to be a Christian any more. It’s not that I didn’t believe in God any more, I still believed, but it was more like I didn’t want anything to do with God. […] When I came to the Youth Hub, it was always like, I knew it was Christian. They didn’t show their love by talking about God, they showed the love of God through their actions. It was more about showing what Christianity is about through actions rather than words. So 1  Collins-Mayo, Sylvia, Bob Mayo, Sally Nash, and Christopher Cocksworth. 2010. The Faith of Generation Y. London: Church House Publishing. 2  Thompson, Naomi. 2018. Young People and Church since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion. London; New York: Routledge.

92 

P. HILL

what they did was they showed me, yeah, I am loved here. I am loved through God. I was never judged, I was always helped out. I was just loved, by the young people and the adults. It was kind of like what Christianity is about, what’s preached. I was shown these actions. And even like when we talk about Christianity it’s never forced. It’s always engaging. We do have these moments when we pray, because it’s one of the norms right, because it’s a Christian organisation. But other than that it’s never forced, even with chapel it’s always optional, like, do you want to talk about God? It’s like, what do you think about this? It’s always open-ended, you know, when we have questions, it’s never about like—well we think this, and if you’re thinking that that’s wrong. It’s always like, what do you think about this, or how do you feel about this? Even other religions, it’s just never a problem coming in here. Even when I came to a leader and was like, I’m not really a Christian she was like, it’s alright, as long as you have nothing against Christianity or any other religion then it’s alright, you can come in. It’s just so welcoming, you know. It’s kind of like an embodiment of what I imagine that Jesus would be like here. If that makes sense, like, the actions. Yeah. Despite growing up in a Christian family, Jonas did not embrace the faith of his parents. He still believed in God, but did not want to be a Christian. Through attending the Youth Hub, he encountered a different kind of Christianity to the one he had known, one that was not forced onto him and was demonstrated through actions and love, rather than words. Jonas’s background is very different to Shahid’s, but both appreciate and mention the lack of force in the way that faith is discussed and practiced at the Youth Hub. Jonas’s case confirms Collins-Mayo et al.’s conclusion that Christian youth work strengthens pre-existing faith in young people, as the work at the drop-in built on a foundation of faith in his life.3 However, it also challenges their conclusion that most of the actions of the youth workers—which they hope will lead to questions about Christian faith—fall under the radar of young peoples’ perceptions. Jonas is acutely aware of the connection between the actions and approach of the youth workers and their Christian faith. He highlights the way that the youth workers cared for him and describes this as an ‘embodiment’ of the way that Jesus would 3

 Collins-Mayo et al.. Faith of Generation Y.

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

93

act; the significance of these actions is certainly not lost on him. Jonas’s description of praying as a ‘norm’ of the drop-in space is hugely significant and something we shall return to in the next section. Across all three of these case studies—Shahid, Michael, and Jonas—there is a clear understanding that the Youth Hub is a Christian organisation. This was explicit in their interaction with it and there was no sense in which this dimension was hidden from them. One critique of Christian youth work is the secretive nature of its ‘conversionist agenda’.4 These stories do not suggest that the Christian faith of the organisation or the workers is in any way hidden or secretive. The other important aspect mentioned by both Shahid and Jonas is the lack of ‘force’ experienced in how Christianity is talked about at the drop-in. They were not required to participate in any activities they did not want to, but rather were invited to explore. One of the key tenets of ethical faith-based youth work is a lack of force in the way that faith is presented.5 It seems that, at least in Shahid and Jonas’s cases, the Youth Hub was ethical in its approach to faith-based youth work. It is also worth pausing to reflect on whether or not the Youth Hub’s form of Christian youth work is a ‘success’ in these three stories. Returning to Collins-Mayo et al.’s research, the authors argue that Christian youth work has proved itself adept at building relationships but less capable of communicating the Christian story.6 The authors explain that the aim of Christian youth work—which they believe to be ‘raising Christian consciousness’—rarely happens, if at all. Collins-Mayo et al. add an important clarification and nuance to the aim of Christian youth work in this statement. The aim is not, reductively, to make young people Christians. Rather, it is to increase consciousness of what it means to be a Christian, even if this ultimately means rejecting the Christian faith or choosing not to explore it. I would argue that in all three of the cases above, including Shahid, there is a raising of Christian consciousness. All three exhibit an awareness of the Christian faith of the workers and a greater awareness of what it is to be a Christian as a consequence of being involved with the drop-in. Although Shahid remains a Muslim after a number of years of involvement, he is interested in exploring Christianity more and wants to 4  Clyne, Allan. 2015. Uncovering Youth Ministry’s Professional Narrative. Youth and Policy 115: 19–42 (27). 5  See Green, Maxine. 2010. Youth Workers as Converters: Ethical Issues in Faith-Based Youth Work. In Ethical Issues in Youth Work, ed. Sarah Banks, 123–38. London: Routledge. 6  Collins-Mayo et al. 109.

94 

P. HILL

know more about Jesus. Similarly, Michael has been introduced to what it is to be a Christian and has adopted this faith for himself, and Jonas has had his understanding of Christianity recalibrated through involvement with the drop-in. The Youth Hub is therefore a place in which Christian consciousness is raised. Granted, these three represent a microcosm of the larger group of young people attending the drop-in. Perhaps if the whole drop-in was analysed, as it was with Collins-Mayo et  al.’s research, low numbers of young people engaging in this way would be found. These three could be the exception, rather than the rule. However, I would question whether it is fair to expect every single young person attending the drop-in to have their Christian consciousness raised. As explored in Chap. 3, there are hugely different levels of engagement represented at the drop-in. Hundreds of young people attend the drop-in infrequently, a smaller group attend regularly, and an even smaller group attend nearly every day. Unsurprisingly, it is the core young people, in the smaller group attending nearly every day, who are the most likely to notice, understand, and engage with the ‘Christian’ aspects of the drop-in. They are the ones who know the youth workers best, who live life alongside them, who see them across multiple contexts, and who get to know how important their Christian faith is to them. Shahid, Michael, and Jonas belong to this core group of young people. The Youth Hub cannot necessarily work in-depth with every single young person who walks through its doors and not all of the young people want an in-depth relationship with the Youth Hub. Although raising Christian consciousness may well be an appropriate aim for every young person and the overarching vision of a Christian youth work project like this, we may need different expectations for each tier of engagement when it comes to how this will be received and responded to by the young people.

A Christian Habitus Not all of the young people will decide to explore Christianity for themselves as a consequence of being at the drop-in and it is not necessarily fair to expect them to do so. What then can be expected or hoped for with the wider group of young people who attend the drop-in? As an uninitiated researcher in the drop-in space, I had anticipated that the majority of young people would be non-religious. This was informed by the majority of research which suggests that this generation of young people is less

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

95

religious than the last one and that religiosity is decreasing by age group.7 I therefore expected at least indifference if not antagonism towards any mention of faith or religion. Returning to the opening extract, and the Wednesday night dinner which began with saying grace, I was surprised by the young peoples’ response. I had not expected the young people to embrace what was happening so readily. It felt as though praying was not a big deal. The young people simply closed their eyes as if it was the most normal thing in the world. The comment from the young person saying that the quiet room will be full—or in other words, that the majority of young people will say ‘yes’ to the question of whether or not God exists— was another indication of where the majority stood with regard to religion and belief. Given the urban and multicultural location of the Youth Hub, perhaps it is unusual in this regard. The majority seemed to belong to one religion or another, and believe in a god. Jonas’s comment that praying is the ‘norm’ at the Youth Hub feels significant in light of this and resonates with the way that the young people responded to saying grace on this particular Wednesday evening. Just as it might be the norm to pray in a religious space, or perhaps to say grace before eating dinner with your grandparents, so too is it the norm to pray at the Youth Hub. It is an accepted part of life at the drop-in and a rhythm that is reflective of the Christian faith of the staff. Young people participate in the social norms of this community and it is therefore a space in which faith is an active part of conversation and practice. Conversations around faith are actively encouraged and staff seek to provide a safe space for young peoples’ thoughts and questions. Returning to Collins-Mayo et  al.’s study, their evaluation of youth groups as ineffective was largely based on their inability to successfully ‘raise Christian consciousness’ or to transmit the Christian narrative to young people. This suggests a primarily cognitive understanding of human beings and of faith formation. It suggests that in a Christian youth work context, the Christian ‘information’ should somehow be passed from youth worker to young person, which simply wasn’t happening in the groups they studied. James K. A. Smith, writing primarily in the area of Christian schooling, has sought to usher in a new understanding of what it means to be human and therefore what role formal education—or in youth work’s case, 7  See, for example, Voas, David. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. European Sociological Review 25, 2: 155–68.

96 

P. HILL

informal education—can play in the ‘educating’ of an individual.8 Smith explains that education is not about depositing Christian ideas into the minds of young people, but rather that Christian education shapes and moulds us into a certain kind of people, people who desire the Kingdom of God. If education is primarily formation, then formation is happening in all areas of life, for good and for bad. The liturgies of sacred and secular settings serve to constitute our identities and form the fundamental desires—our ‘vision of the good life’—which underpin our entire way of acting and being in the world. Humans are, according to Smith, primarily desiring animals over thinking things, motivated by what they love. Through the lens of formation, humans are viewed as a different kind of animal, not as ones who don’t think at all, but ones who have a more fundamental pre-cognitive orientation to the world. According to this understanding of what it is to be human—that we are primarily embodied pre-cognitive beings shaped by desires over thought— positive change must begin in the shaping of the desires, rather than the passing on of information. De Kock and Sonnenberg draw similar ideas into a youth ministry paradigm, arguing that the focus of Christian youth work should not only be on cognitive processes, but on concrete experiences, acts, and rituals, which constitute embodied faith.9 The over-­ emphasis on cognition is a hangover of enlightenment thinking, the authors argue, which downplays the role of the body and has resulted in an overly intellectualised approach to church and youth ministry. The rhythms of prayer and faith at the drop-in map onto the embodied rituals explored by Smith and de Kock and Sonnenberg. Where Christian youth work has historically emphasised an intellectual passing on of Christian faith, they suggest that ritual and the acts of a community may also be significant—if not more significant—in the shaping of a certain kind of people. Another way of thinking about these community acts, particularly the process of ‘normalisation’ of faith acts like praying, is habitus. The word habitus originated from the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition, and gained traction in sociology through the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu.10 For Bourdieu, culture is not a set of thoughts or propositions 8  Smith, James K.  A.. 2009. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic. 9  de Kock, Jos, and Ronelle Sonnenberg. 2012. Embodiment: Reflections on Religious Learning in Youth Ministry. Journal of Youth and Theology 11, 1–2: 7–22. 10   Bourdieu, Pierre. 2005. Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. In The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, ed. Bruce W. Holsinger, 221–42. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. 233.

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

97

but is more like a series of musical notes, which when learned can be replicated, adapted, and rearranged to create whole new compositions. More than this, participating in a culture actually creates the thoughts, perceptions, and actions characteristic of that culture. Habitus is generative as it can create a new set of thoughts and feelings. The internalised schemes of a habitus exist on a subconscious or pre-­ conscious level. They bypass consciousness, inscribing an ‘immanent law’ on our bodies.11 An individual not only participates in and receives a habitus, but becomes involved in it, or part of it, and it becomes part of them. Bourdieu describes this process as ‘mimesis’: the practice of mimicking something or re-presenting something that has been witnessed or experienced.12 This imitation is not intentional, or a conscious effort to reproduce the act, but pre-reflective. It is common wisdom that we become like those we are around; perhaps this is what the Proverb writer meant when he warned that whoever keeps company with the wise becomes wise, while hanging around with fools will lead to harm.13 Or perhaps this is why we end up using the same words, and picking up the unusual turns of phrases, as those we spend time with. This mimicry, or mimesis, is a deeply intuitive process and happens without us thinking about it. It could be that through participation in the Youth Hub habitus, which involves Christian rituals like praying before mealtimes and talking about God, this particular cultural code begins to operate on a subconscious level in the young people who attend. It could mean that, over time, young people not only participate in or witness these activities, but actually start replicating them in their own lives. Like a series of musical notes that they hear, time and time again, they may begin not only to hear those notes but to sing them and maybe even to make their own compositions from them. They may be more likely to pray, for example, if prayer has become a ‘normal’ part of their life at the drop-in. They may start to think about or talk about God more because these conversations are actively encouraged at the drop-in. This is particularly true of the young people who attend the drop-in regularly, for a number of years. Some young people attend the drop-in five days a week, for up to seven years. That’s a lot of Wednesday night  Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. 59.  Bourdieu. Logic of Practice. 73. 13  Proverbs 13:20. 11 12

98 

P. HILL

dinners and prayer times. It’s impossible to know what impact this might have, but it’s likely that it will establish some form of normality when it comes to saying grace and praying before eating. In this sense, and in the way that the young people relate to the drop-in, it is offering a Christian home for the young people who come. The drop-in incorporates both conscious Christian engagement—as we saw with Jonas, Michael, and Shahid—and pre-conscious engagement in the form of a Christian habitus. The distinction between these two is perhaps not as cut and dry as the separation may suggest. They are interwoven and cannot necessarily be disentangled from each other. Collins-Mayo et al.’s study does not take seriously the different levels of engagement at a place like the drop-in. It is not fair to expect all of the young people at the drop-in to engage with faith in the same way, just as it would not be fair to expect all of the young people to engage in relationships with the leaders, with the fun activities, or with workshops about raising aspirations in the same way. If we expect the same for all young people and seek to measure quantitatively whether we have met that aim, we will fail. However, if we have a nuanced understanding of the range of engagements at a provision like this and embrace both conscious and pre-conscious—transformative and formative14—levels of participation in a Christian youth work provision, we may capture more of what God is doing in and through such spaces.

The Living Space of the Church The young people at the drop-in are drawn into the practices of the Christian community at the Youth Hub. They participate in prayer times before meals, have conversations about faith, and attend Christian events like summer camps. These practices are considered ‘normal’ in this space and the young people are unperturbed by them. We must pause here to consider how normal it is for practices like praying to be the ‘norm’. Perhaps in religious schools, praying might be considered normal. One might expect, however, that in the predominantly secular Western context of the UK, the ‘norm’ would be non-religion or at least religion not being on the radar of young peoples’ everyday life-worlds. This is certainly what I expected. The culture created at the drop-in therefore stands in  These are Savage et al.’s categories, see Savage, Sara, Bob Mayo, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, and Graham Cray. 2006. Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 15- to 25-Year-­ Olds. London: Church House. 14

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

99

opposition to the dominant culture around it and has formed a different kind of space. Perhaps this is close to what Shepherd describes as a ‘plausibility shelter’ for faith, a space in which faith exploration is made more possible and belief more plausible through the communal practice of it.15 The staff told me explicitly in their interviews that the Youth Hub is not a church. To put it crudely, and in order to sidestep questions of ecclesiology which are important but too large to tackle here, it is a parachurch organisation. It is run by Christians with a Christian vision, but is not a church. However, there are aspects of this Christian community, and the way that it acts, that rub off on the young people who spend time in it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of the lebensraum—the living space of the church—may be helpful in placing the conversation around the conscious and pre-conscious activity of the Youth Hub community into a theological dimension. In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer emphasises the necessary visibility of the church community. This visibility involves, to some extent, taking up space, as it is impossible to be visible without occupying physical space. Just as the body of Christ took up space on Earth, so too must the Church. Bonhoeffer writes: A truth, a doctrine, or a religion need no space for themselves. They are disembodied entities. They are heard, learnt and apprehended, and that is all. But the incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living men who will follow him. That is why he called his disciples into a literal, bodily following, and thus made his fellowship with them a visible reality.16

Spatial images of what the Church is and should be therefore cannot be avoided. To deny the physicality or embodied nature of the Church is to ‘devalue it into a purely spiritual entity’.17 On the other hand, though, to think about the space of the Church in a purely empirical sense would be wrong, according to Bonhoeffer. The Church does not compete with the world for space or seek to expand and conquer physical territory. Rather, ‘[i]t desires no more space than it needs to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world’s reconciliation to God through Jesus 15  Shepherd, Nick. 2016. Faith Generation: Retaining Young People and Growing the Church. London: SPCK. 64. 16  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2003. Discipleship (DBWE 4). Eds. J. D. Godsey and G. B. Kelly. Trans. B. Green and R. Krauss. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 185. 17  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2009. Ethics (DBWE 6). Ed. C.  J. Green. Trans. R.  Krauss, D. W. Stott and C. C. West. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 63.

100 

P. HILL

Christ’.18 The Church needs only the required space to proclaim to the world that everything has already been reconciled and made new in Christ. Where the Church has become invisible and no longer takes up the required space to witness to Christ, this silence is a sign of ‘inner decay’,19 like a tree that bears no fruit. Following on from his discussion of the visibility of the church community in Discipleship, Bonhoeffer introduces his notion of the lebensraum. The same term was used by Hitler to justify the expansion of German territory across national borders in order to procure by force the future and survival of the German people. It is a politically charged concept, one that Bonhoeffer appropriates and infuses with a different theological meaning. Bonhoeffer is clear that the lebensraum he speaks of is not a territorial domination of space, a move across enemy borders in a ruthless battle between the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God; there is no expansion mentioned by Bonhoeffer. Or, if there is any kind of expansion across boundaries, it is simply the turning outward of what has become an internalised spirituality, a journey beyond the boundaries of self to the wider world. The Church is simply called to be visible, which requires taking up space. This space has several dimensions. There is firstly the space required for the Church’s liturgy and order, the preaching of the Word and the sacraments. Then there is the space for the daily life of its members, which is ‘why we must now speak of the living-space [lebensraum] of the visible Church’.20 Another perhaps more helpful translation of lebensraum is ‘habitat’. The lebensraum of the Church is the space between the Word and the sacrament, or, in more common language, the life we live between Sundays. It is ‘the living space in which the new ethic is practised and nurtured in such a way that it gives distinctive shape to this new Christian habitat’.21 It is the extension of the social life of the Church to those who are forgotten by the world, despised, or dishonoured, a ‘communal enactment’22 or public expression of what the Church believes.

 Bonhoeffer. Ethics. 63–4.  Ethics. 64. 20  Bonhoeffer. Discipleship. 190. 21  Fergus, Donald. 2014. Lebensraum—Just What Is This ‘Habitat’ or ‘Living Space’ That Dietrich Bonhoeffer Claimed for the Church? Scottish Journal of Theology 67, 1: 70–84 (76). 22  Webster, John. 2005. Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics. London: T&T Clark International. 176. 18 19

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

101

When it comes to its work with young people, it would not be unfair to say that the Church has become invisible. It no longer plays the same role in community life as it once did, and has retreated to the sidelines of young peoples’ existence. Although young people may return to church for births, weddings, and funerals, it has become largely irrelevant to their everyday lives. For the minority of teenagers who still attend church regularly in the UK, it may play a central role. But on the whole, for this ‘memoryless generation’,23 the Church does not show up in a meaningful way in their lives. As Bonhoeffer makes clear, the visibility required of the Church is not purely about empirical space. There are many church buildings lying dormant across the UK with no church communities to fill them. If it is about occupying physical space, then the Church does not have a problem. Rather, perhaps what Bonhoeffer is getting at is about being visible in ways in which people can actually see and hear the witness that is being given. It is all well and good to have physical buildings, but if young people are not looking to these places then no testimony is being seen or heard. There is something here about showing up and being visible where young people can see and witness what is being said. There is a need to be present and show up where young people are present, in order that the witness is not lost in a misaligned communication; there is a missional dimension to what Bonhoeffer is talking about. If the Church must be a city on a hill, then it needs to find the hills on the landscapes of young peoples’ lives and move onto them, in order to shine brightly and be seen. The drop-in is a visible expression of church community in its living space or habitat. The young people get to know the staff well and get to see and experience what it is like to be a Christian in everyday life. In their good moments and less good moments, the staff are visible to the young people. This happens in the small encounters, the way that they talk, and how they respond to issues. It is through the relationships built over many hours, days, weeks, and years, and large portions of time spent being together. It includes the conversations that are explicitly about faith and the ones that are not. It includes the intentional Christian practices and everything else. This is a space in which the staff show up and are seen.

 Collins-Mayo et al.. Faith of Generation Y. 23.

23

102 

P. HILL

Conclusion As with all aspects of the drop-in provision, there were a range of engagements in relation to its faith offering. For some young people, like Shahid, Jonas, and Michael, the drop-in is a place where Christian faith is explored and discussed openly, and in some cases, adopted; this is an example of the intended raising of Christian consciousness that Collins-Mayo et al. argue is essential to any Christian youth work provision. For other young people, however, the drop-in is simply a place to attend infrequently, to hang out with friends, and to play PlayStation. In these cases, and with young people who form only a loose attachment to the Youth Hub and its community, it is perhaps unfair or inappropriate to expect faith transmission or engagement with the Christian aspects of the drop-in—unless they are particularly interested to do so. What has been missed by other studies of Christian youth clubs is the significance of pre-cognitive activity, such as regular Christian practices. At the drop-in, Christian practices like praying before meal times had become the ‘norm’ and were an accepted part of the life of this community. It is possible that over time, these practices which form a Christian habitus may not only be an accepted part of life at the drop-in, but something that young people start to replicate in their own lives. Even if young people do not participate in the explicitly ‘Christian’ activities or conversations, they are part of the Christian habitus at the drop-in to the extent that they choose to be and the distinctively Christian home that is offered. Placing this into a theological dimension, Bonhoeffer’s concept of the lebensraum highlighted the significance of the Christian community showing up and being seen by young people. There is a serious challenge here for the Church. As Bonhoeffer emphasises, where the Church has become silent in the lives of young people, it is a sign of inner decay, like a tree that is bearing no fruit. We need to find ways of becoming visible to young people again. The Youth Hub is a place where the community of God and its culture and practices are visible and seen by young people outside of the Church. It is a place where the youth workers try to practice and nurture the ‘new ethic’ of Christian living and the formation of a Christian habitat. It is a place where young people can get a feel for what this community is like and what its rituals and practices are. It is a chance for young people to see all of the good stuff and all of the bad stuff—to see, honestly, how Christians go about their lives in the world, day by day. It is a place where the people of God show up on young people’s terms rather than the

5  SHAHID: A CHRISTIAN HOME 

103

other way around. We need more such ways of being with young people and being visible to them. The Youth Hub is one such example of how we can do this in practice.

References Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2003. Discipleship (DBWE 4), ed. J.  D. Godsey and G. B. Kelly, Trans. B. Green and R. Krauss. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2009. Ethics (DBWE 6), ed. C. J. Green and Trans. R. Krauss, D. W. Stott and C. C. West. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2005. Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. In The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, ed. Bruce W. Holsinger, 221–242. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Clyne, Allan. 2015. Uncovering Youth Ministry’s Professional Narrative. Youth and Policy 115: 19–42. Collins-Mayo, Sylvia, Bob Mayo, Sally Nash, and Christopher Cocksworth. 2010. The Faith of Generation Y. London: Church House Publishing. Fergus, Donald. 2014. Lebensraum  – Just What Is This ‘Habitat’ Or ‘Living Space’ That Dietrich Bonhoeffer Claimed for the Church? Scottish Journal of Theology 67 (1): 70–84. Green, Maxine. 2010. Youth Workers as Converters: Ethical Issues in Faith-Based Youth Work. In Ethical Issues in Youth Work, ed. Sarah Banks, 123–138. London: Routledge. de Kock, Jos, and Ronelle Sonnenberg. 2012. Embodiment: Reflections on Religious Learning in Youth Ministry. Journal of Youth and Theology 11 (1–2): 7–22. Savage, Sara, Bob Mayo, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, and Graham Cray. 2006. Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 15- to 25-Year-Olds. London: Church House. Shepherd, Nick. 2016. Faith Generation: Retaining Young People and Growing the Church. London: SPCK. Smith, James K.A. 2009. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic. Thompson, Naomi. 2018. Young People and Church Since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion. London; New York: Routledge. Voas, David. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. European Sociological Review 25 (2): 155–168. Webster, John. 2005. Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics 2. London: T&T Clark International.

CHAPTER 6

Miriam: A Penultimate Home

Lena and Charlotte are the first through the drop-in doors, piling in as soon as it opens. They join me at the dining table. Charlotte is wearing some very smart and clean looking Timberland boots; I wonder if she got them for Christmas. There are lots of shouts of ‘Hey!’ and ‘Happy New Year!’ from around the drop-in space. I ask Charlotte how her holiday was. Good, she replies. ‘My mum insisted on getting a personalised cake for me’, she adds, placing a cardboard box on the table. ‘For here?’ I ask. She says yes. I can sense she is quite pleased about it, but is making out that it’s a pain or embarrassing. She opens up the box and shows me the cake—it has lovely whipped icing, and the words ‘Happy Birthday Charlotte’ written on the top. She’s bought it in for everyone to enjoy, and so Freya takes it into the kitchen and starts to cut it up. Lena shows off her new nose ring, and says how painful it is to wear it up in her nostrils during school time (they aren’t allowed to have nose rings at school). She says how happy she is to be back. ‘It was so weird last week going from school straight home.’ She clearly comes here most days. As they arrive, other young people say how much they have missed the Youth Hub over the holidays. Robbie turns up, saying that he had ‘stuff all’ to do. I spot youth worker Miriam perched on top of a radiator by the front door, and I go to join her. It’s been freezing all day in the office, and so we are huddled here for heat (she also has a hot water bottle). The room is very quiet—there are five or six young people sat on two sofas, all looking at their phones and drinking milkshakes. There are three or four boys playing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_6

105

106 

P. HILL

PlayStation in the far corner, and Freya is stood chatting with them. There are a few younger boys on the computers, and James is talking to them about Warhammer. After sitting for a while, I look over at the group on their phones and say to Miriam, ‘We should probably go and chat to those guys’. ‘You know what?’ she replies, ‘I think they are fine. They don’t necessarily want me barging over there and saying, “Hi guys!” and making everything less fun. It’s nice that they can just be here and not have to engage with me, who they don’t know very well.’ We don’t move from our spot for 20 minutes or so, when Charlotte appears at the door. ‘On what grounds can you refuse a stop and search?’ she asks Miriam, out of the blue. Miriam replies, ‘I don’t know the answer to that one’. Charlotte walks off to ask another leader. ‘Oh great,’ Miriam says quietly to me, ‘that means Charlotte is known to the police, as they have to have a reason and justification for why they would ask to search her. So they must think she is carrying drugs or weapons.’

Interactions like these reveal just how complex many young people’s lives are. In a space like the drop-in, it became normal to hear of interactions with the police, challenging home environments and violent bustups with peers. Over time I became increasingly unfazed by these incidents, as the young people themselves were. This is the landscape of a young person like Charlotte’s life and she knows nothing different. For youth workers like Miriam, seeking to support, challenge, intervene, and guide, it was sometimes hard to know where to begin. These forces felt so dominant, together creating a web of difficult circumstances impossible to disentangle. Into this set-up, youth work feels like fire-fighting—constantly seeking to extinguish one potential inferno before another blazes. It is not hard to see why a holistic form of Christian youth work is needed in this context. A youth worker may ultimately believe that sharing faith with a young person is what they need, or that sharing faith may be the ultimate goal of their work, but when urgent and pressing needs present themselves—such as safety—these inevitably become the primary focus. In Miriam’s interview, she expressed this dynamic through a metaphor of weeds and seeds:

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

Miriam:

107

There’s things in young people’s lives that mean that the soil that represents their life and the way that they live, there are things within that that are unhealthy, that are difficult, that actually feel quite crippling and feel like just, overwhelming and just taking over. And I think actually part of our role as Christians is to help people—to help, sort of, cultivate that ground, and actually help de-weed some of that stuff, because I don’t think our role as Christians is just to plant a seed and walk away, and say ‘great well, the seed’s planted now so I have done my job’. Actually it’s to really take care of that young person and know that right now, what we really need to do is work on this area—and that might be mental health, that might be self-­harm, that might be self-esteem and value. And so actually we really wanna cultivate this ground, we want to help turn this into good soil. And one day a seed can be planted and that seed can take root.

Miriam describes the soil of young people’s lives, and the need to cultivate the ground and ‘de-weed’ it. She also talks about planting seeds, and how it is not enough just to throw a seed onto uncultivated soil and hope for the best. Miriam’s metaphor is reminiscent of the Parable of the Sower from Matthew 13. In this parable that Jesus told, we see a sower, going out into the fields to spread seed. He spreads the seed liberally—some falling on the pathway and being eaten by birds, and some falling on shallow soil and not being able to take root. A further batch falls on good soil, but the weeds surrounding the plant choke it, killing it. Finally, some seed falls on good soil and produces an abundant harvest. The meaning of the parable is explained: the seed is the message of the Kingdom and the different soils refer to different people receiving the news in different ways. In this metaphor Miriam artfully captures something important about Christian youth work, which we began to uncover in the previous chapter: Christian youth work is more than just ‘planting seeds’ or telling young people about the Christian faith. As Miriam makes clear, it is broader than that—it must be broader than that. All of the difficulties in young people’s lives present challenges that get in the way of them receiving the message of the Kingdom. These challenges are, to use Miriam’s description, like weeds that grow up in the soil of their lives. Part of the role of a Christian youth worker is to set about cultivating good soil, to ‘de-weed’, and to

108 

P. HILL

prepare the ground for the seed to take root. There are therefore two elements to good Christian youth work: sowing seed and cultivating ground. Miriam was not alone among the staff at the Youth Hub in using this metaphor. Approximately half of the staff in their interviews described their work using the metaphor of ‘planting seeds’ in young people’s lives. It was evidently a helpful image or theological frame to enable them to make sense of what they were doing. For those who mentioned it, planting seeds also articulated trusting God with the outcome of their work: they described planting seeds that may bear fruit later on in the young people’s lives and potentially never knowing or seeing the impact. Over the course of this book, we have explored the various ways in which the young people experienced a home at the drop-in and what this home reality might mean. We are now at the point of discussing what this might mean beyond the drop-in, for youth work and theology, and the normativity of this home reality at the drop-in. The simple fact that young people are experiencing a home at the Youth Hub does not mean that they should have a home at the drop-in or that Christians working with young people should create home with and for them. We need to switch into a different dimension here, offering a theological case for why Christians creating home with young people is meaningful Christian action. To do this, we will revisit some key elements from Heidegger’s thinking which will help to draw out and construct a theology of home from Bonhoeffer’s work. Resonating with Miriam’s metaphor of the weeds and seeds, a theological case for the importance of home as preparing the way will emerge.

Revisiting Heidegger In Miriam’s description, all of the wider work at the Youth Hub—the emotional, social, and spiritual work—could be said to fit into the bracket of preparing the ground. Similarly, the broad remit of the drop-in could be said to be part of this work of de-weeding, of removing obstacles that get in the way of a young person’s flourishing. These activities, projects, and relationships therefore have the intention of facilitating growth in a young person’s life and removing that which hinders them. It is about clearing and preparing a space for good seeds to grow and bear fruit. This is reminiscent of Heidegger’s thinking on cultivating ground and clearing a space for something to be what it is, defined by his term ‘releasement’ or letting-be. Translated from the German Gelassenheit, it is a particular orientation towards things, a way of allowing things to dwell and be at home, and to be what they are. It is a restoring of something to what

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

109

it is or should be, and creating a space in which it can be what it is. Heidegger talks about a ‘clearing’, like a clearing in a forest—a space which has been removed of its trees to open up new possibilities and potential.1 A bit like Miriam’s de-weeding, it is the creation of space in order to let something come to presence as what it is. This letting-be or sparing of something is not a passive activity. It is not about letting things carry on as they are and hoping for the best. In ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, Heidegger explains this proactive releasing more plainly and connects this disposition of safeguarding and sparing with dwelling and being at home: To free actually means to spare. The sparing itself consists not only in the fact that we do not harm the one whom we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own essence, when we return it specifically to its essential being, when we ‘free’ it in the proper sense of the word into a preserve of peace. To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing.2

As Heidegger explains here, to safeguard something is not only to prevent harm from befalling it but involves ‘something positive’. To safeguard something includes a restorative element. Elsewhere, Heidegger articulates this restoration using the language of saving, an act which can ‘fetch something home into its essence’.3 Returning to Miriam’s metaphor may help us grasp this. In her description, the seeds planted were not able to flourish because the weeds of challenging circumstances grew up and choked the life out of the plant. There was a need, she explained, to clear away these weeds so that the soil was ready and able to accept a seed and to enable the seed to grow into a strong and healthy plant. This clearing away is similar to what Heidegger writes above: it is freeing or sparing the seed to become what it is, to be safeguarded and protected from anything that would prevent it becoming 1  Heidegger, Martin. 1971. The Origin of the Work of Art. In Poetry, Language, Thought, 15–88. Trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row. 53. 2  Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, 239–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 246. 3  Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 3–35. Trans. W. Lovitt. New York; Hagerstown; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row. 28.

110 

P. HILL

what it is destined to be. In this sense, to fail to cultivate the ground could be said to be a form of negligence, a failure to safeguard and protect the life that could grow. Connected to Heidegger’s notion of clearing a space is his distinctive understanding of boundary and place. Drawing again on his metaphor of the clearing in the forest, the line of trees that forms the perimeter of the open space provides a boundary or an edge to the new space created. All spaces have boundaries, as do homes, and are in some senses defined by the boundaries that demarcate them from the outside. These boundaries may be walls or windows, bricks or concrete, fences or hedges, but they define and separate one place and one home from another. As Miroslav Wolf says, if the boundaries of a home are too fluid, it merges with the world, and if they are too rigid, it becomes a tomb.4 Boundaries, however we interpret them, in some senses define home. Heidegger offers a novel understanding of boundary and its relationship to place. Throughout his writings, Heidegger rejected a dominantly technological view of the world. Heidegger also therefore rejected a physical-­technological perspective on space, the view that space is a container within which particular places occur. For example, we may imagine that the Earth sits in the middle of the vast expanse of the galaxy. Heidegger argued that the opposite is true, that space is actually ‘made room’ for by particular locations, and not the other way around; it is the presence of the Earth that marks out the space set around it. It is the boundaries created by locations (what Heidegger calls locales) that make room for space: A space is something that has been made room for, something that has been freed, namely, within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized [sic], the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a locale, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their essential being from locales and not from ‘space’.5 4  Volf, Miroslav. 2019. The World as God’s Home. Cadbury Lectures. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/theologyandreligion/events/cadburylectures/2019/index.aspx. Accessed 9 July 2021. 5  Heidegger. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. 250.

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

111

Here Heidegger explains that boundaries do not demarcate the edge of a place, but its beginning. For example, walls do not represent the ‘edge’ of a room, but rather, it is only through its walls that a room comes to be. Without the walls, and its boundary, there would be no room. The trees that line the perimeter of a clearing in the forest are not therefore the edge, but rather the beginning of the space created: they define and make possible the clearing. With these two elements from Heidegger in mind— creating a space for something to become what it is and boundary as the beginning of place—we shall turn to Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer and Boundary Like Heidegger, Bonhoeffer uses the term boundary in a distinctive way. In Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer’s theological exegesis of Genesis 1–3, we see the beginnings of his particular use of this term. Following the Genesis narrative, Bonhoeffer tells the story of God placing two trees at the centre of the Garden of Eden. In the command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil at the centre of the garden, God, according to Bonhoeffer, points out Adam’s limit. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘The human being’s limit is at the center of human existence, not on the margin’.6 This limit or boundary is not, for Bonhoeffer, at the edge of human existence. It is not the limit of what humanity is capable of, or the limit at the edge of humanity’s finite possibilities. Rather, the limit or boundary is at the centre of existence. Life is not contained by the boundary or limit, as if the limit is a constraint on Adam’s freedom, but rather begins at the centre. In this way of life established in the Garden of Eden by God, the boundary stood at the centre of humankind’s existence. It was this way of being, this orientation around the boundary at the centre, that was fundamentally disrupted and recalibrated by the Fall: We ask, what has happened? In the first place what has happened is that the center has been intruded upon, the boundary has been transgressed. Now humankind stands in the middle, with no limit. Standing in the middle 6  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2004. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3 (DBWE 3). Ed. J. W. de Gruchy. Trans. D. S. Bax. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 86. Although this term is translated as ‘limit’ here, it is taken from the German Grenze which can also be translated as boundary; these two terms, limit and boundary, are used interchangeably in the English versions of Bonhoeffer’s works.

112 

P. HILL

means living from its own resources and no longer from the center. Having no limit means being alone. To be in the center and to be alone means to be sicut deus. Humankind is now sicut deus. It now lives out of its own resources, creates its own life, is its own creator; it no longer needs the Creator, it has itself become creator, inasmuch as it creates its own life. Thereby its creatureliness is eliminated, destroyed.7

Bonhoeffer writes that in their disobedience to God’s command, a shift occurs in Adam and Eve. The tree that stood at the centre of their lives, pointing out their limit and boundary, is no more. According to Bonhoeffer, in this moment Adam and Eve really become sicut deus—like God. The creature becomes like the creator and therefore no longer has need for the creator. Humanity becomes its own source of life, its own centre. The boundary has been lost and humankind now stands on its own, without limit. More than just the boundary is lost here: there is a sense in which humanity becomes less than human. There is a fundamental connection for Bonhoeffer between being human and being a creature, an essence that is lost in the Fall. The Fall is therefore a dehumanising event or a loss of true humanity. On account of this act, Adam and Eve are sent away from the garden, forever excluded from the intimate relationship with God they had enjoyed. And yet it is not the boundary that has moved, but humanity: the ‘boundary has not shifted; it is where it always was, at the tree of life in the centre’.8 A new kind of border emerges in this moment, as Adam and Eve find themselves shut out from the garden. The boundary at the centre had brought them freedom and life, but now the gate which expels them from the garden is a border that assails them, constrains them, and prevents their way back to the reality they once knew. The loss of humanity is therefore also the loss of home.9  Bonhoeffer. 2004. Creation and Fall. 115.  144. 9  In Act and Being Bonhoeffer draws an association between home and becoming ‘a child’ (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2009. Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology (DBWE 2). Eds. W. W. Floyd and H-R. Reuter. Trans. M. H. Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 161.). As his theology developed in later works, most notably in Ethics, he articulates this restoration of childlikeness using the language of becoming ‘human’ again. This, for Bonhoeffer, begins with Christology, therefore presenting what Jens Zimmermann describes as a ‘Christological humanism’ (Zimmermann, Jens, and Brian Gregor. 2010. Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications). For Bonhoeffer, ‘human beings are not transformed 7 8

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

113

Given that Creation and Fall follows the first three chapter of Genesis chronologically, it is perhaps unsurprising that Christ does not receive much of a mention. However, not wanting to end without a hopeful note, Bonhoeffer finishes the book with a paragraph about Christ’s redemptive act: The end of Cain’s history, and so the end of all history, is Christ on the cross, the murdered son of God. That is the last desperate assault on the gate of paradise. And under the whirling sword, under the cross, the human race dies. But Christ lives. The trunk of the cross becomes the wood of life, and now in the midst of the world, on the accursed ground itself, life is raised up anew. In the center of the world, from the wood of the cross, the fountain of life springs up.10

At the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, another shift occurs for Bonhoeffer. Where the tree at the centre of the Garden of Eden had been humanity’s boundary, from which they were shut out, now the tree of the cross becomes a new centre. A new boundary at the centre is established through Christ’s death and a new source of life. Humanity is no longer assailed by the gate that remains shut, as the pathway to paradise is reopened once again. Beyond the cross, Christ Himself is the boundary who stands before humanity and points out its limit. In his Christology lectures, Bonhoeffer once again establishes that the new Christ boundary stands not at the edge of existence, but at the centre: This boundary lies between my old self and my new self, that is, in the center [sic] between myself and me. As the limit, Christ is at the same time the center that I have regained. As boundary, the boundary can only be seen from its other side, outside the limit. Thus it is important that we human beings, in recognizing that our limit is in Christ, at the same time see that in this limit we have found our new center.11

into an alien form, the form of God, but into the form that belongs to them, that is essentially their own. Human beings become human because God became human’ (Act and Being. 96.). 10  Bonhoeffer. 2004. Creation and Fall. 145–6. 11  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2009. Lectures on Christology. In Berlin, 1932–1933 (DBWE 12), Ed. L. L. Rasmussen, 299–360. Trans. I. Best, D. Higgins and D. W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 324.

114 

P. HILL

Through Christ, humanity finds its new centre. Christ stands as the new centre not only of human existence but of history and nature, both spatially and temporally; all things are reoriented around Christ as the boundary at the centre. The implication of Bonhoeffer’s thinking is that where humanity had moved away from the boundary at the centre in the Garden of Eden at the Fall, it is God who makes the redemptive move: Christ himself—the new boundary—ventures out from the garden onto the ‘accursed ground’ where humans find themselves.

Reading Bonhoeffer Through a Heideggerian Lens In order to understand the significance of what Bonhoeffer is saying here, or to attempt an interpretation of what it means for Christ to be the rediscovered boundary at the centre, we must draw these elements together with Heidegger’s distinctive understanding of boundary. As discussed, boundary, for Heidegger, does not represent an edge or a limit but rather the beginning of a space. Heidegger understands boundary not as the terminus or end, but rather as the origin. What might this mean for Bonhoeffer’s notion of Christ as the rediscovered boundary? Firstly, Heidegger’s description of boundary as beginning and as the location from which something unfolds resonates with how Bonhoeffer describes the boundary at the centre in the Garden of Eden. The tree from which Adam and Eve are commanded not to eat is also the centre of their life, the source from which their life begins. Although the tree points out humanity’s limit, it is a freeing kind of limit. It is not a limit which oppresses or constrains, but rather one that brings life and freedom. This flows from Bonhoeffer’s particular definition of freedom within relationship; it is only within a boundary that I am free. No one, according to Bonhoeffer, can be free in a vacuum.12 Rather, it is within a boundary and limit that I am given space to explore who I am and become who I am. It is therefore only in relation to the boundary of the tree at the centre of the garden that Adam and Eve have life and freedom. The tree, the boundary, is the origin of their life and freedom.13 12  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1959. Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3. London: SCM. 35. 13  There is precedent in Bonhoeffer’s later works for relating boundary to origin in this way. Building implicitly on his work in Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer writes that ‘human beings cannot escape their origin. Instead of knowing themselves within God, who is their origin, they now must know themselves as the origin’ (Ethics. 300.).

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

115

To say that Christ is the boundary at the centre is therefore to say that Christ is a new origin or beginning. But a new beginning of what? The suggestion I wish to make is that Christ as the boundary is the origin of a new place, a new home place. Where Adam and Eve had been estranged from their home, no longer living their lives oriented around the boundary at the centre but exiled to a boundary-less space, a new source of life stands at the centre of existence through Christ’s redemptive act, and the way home is opened up once again. This new place established through Christ is not to be understood as a physical or technological place. Bonhoeffer emphasises that the place of Christ does not compete for ‘space’ in the world; all things are, in some sense, already included in the reconciliation which reaches far beyond the locations and boundaries of the world. If place is conceived of as an orientation around a boundary, then the loss of the boundary at the centre is the loss of place, the loss of the home place; human beings are displaced through the loss of the boundary. With the re-established boundary at the centre through Christ’s redemptive act, a new place is opened up or ‘made room’ for, like the clearing in the forest.14 Christ opens up the clearing, the new place where God and humankind can meet. Resisting a physical or technological understanding of this new home place does not somehow make it less real. Understanding place in the manner of unfolding from a boundary does not relegate it to the level of an intangible reality, or perhaps, in a dualistic sense, a ‘spiritual’ one. It may or may not be significant that Bonhoeffer explicitly references Christ dying on the cross as the re-found centre, not just the person of Jesus; the cross is a tangible and concrete location. My life oriented around the cross enables me to live in the new place opened up by Christ, in a now and not-yet sense. This is not a place of my making, but one initiated by Christ; it is not I who orient myself around Christ, but Christ who orients me. It is therefore encounter with Christ as the boundary who draws my life into his orbit. There is tension here in Bonhoeffer’s thinking as he insists that all things are oriented around Christ the new boundary; all things are already redeemed in this act and the world is fundamentally changed, and yet each person must encounter the person of Christ who calls out to them and points out their limit in order to be reoriented around him. The cross is perhaps an unlikely place to find home. The cross—the ‘whirling sword’ as Bonhoeffer describes it—is an image of torture and of  Heidegger. The Origin of the Work of Art. 53.

14

116 

P. HILL

violent attack. In many ways Golgotha is the most unhomely scene imaginable, with Jesus strung up on a wooden pole alongside criminals, gasping for breath and struggling to stay alive. And yet it is here, at this most homeless of locations, that humanity is made at home once again. It is also here that Jesus enters most deeply into our homelessness and that the family of the triune God is severed and broken apart. It is on the cross that God became a broken family, so that our broken homes and families might be renewed and made whole. The question remains of how much we can enter into this renewed home right now. A tension exists in Bonhoeffer’s thinking between the home that has already arrived, through Christ’s redemptive act, and the ultimate, eschatological home that will be fully realised at the end of all things. One of the challenges of speaking of home in theological perspective is the tendency to collapse into a dualism between the Earth and the ‘true home’ in heaven; this sort of thinking appears evident in Bonhoeffer’s early sermons, explored in the introduction. Being at home on Earth and being at home in heaven are perceived to be competing realities, with one precluding the other. Inevitably, there are good ways of being at home on the Earth and less good ways. But in Bonhoeffer’s account it is implicit that being oriented around Christ at the centre, and therefore participating in the home place opened up by Christ, is a true way of being at home on the Earth. Adam and Eve lived in sync with creation and creator in the Garden of Eden, oriented around the trees standing at the centre. When this boundary is transgressed they are displaced and exiled from their true home, and the order and pattern of life—and the dynamic relationship between creator, creature, and creation—is disrupted. Reorientation around the new boundary of Christ must therefore enable a way back to right relationship with all things, and a true way of being at home, both in a now and in a not-yet sense. How much this is possible in this life, rather than the next, is the question we must now ponder.

A Penultimate Home The new home place opened up by Christ, the rediscovered boundary, is very much real but not yet tangible. One of Bonhoeffer’s central concerns was to move away from abstraction towards reality. Bonhoeffer’s project was therefore a call to the concrete, a call to the empirical over the abstract.15 To overcome the abstraction of religious terms like sin,  Bonhoeffer. Ethics. 59.

15

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

117

incarnation, God, and in this case, home, he believed that they must become empirical and familiar again in a new way. The question then is how concrete, empirical home places relate to the deeper reality of becoming at home with Christ. Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the penultimate and ultimate offers us a potential answer. To begin to understand these concepts, we must grasp what Bonhoeffer means by the ultimate. Bonhoeffer explains that the ultimate is the justification of a sinner, which is the beginning of the Christian life. In other words, it is the moment when an individual encounters Christ and chooses to follow him. This event does not follow as a continuation of natural events, as if an individual can bring it about, but rather is solely the act of Christ. The justification of a sinner is a complete break with everything that has gone before—all that is penultimate. This does not mean, however, that everything penultimate is worthless. Bonhoeffer writes: The word of God’s justifying grace never leaves its place as the ultimate word. It never simply presents itself as an achieved outcome that could now just as well be placed at the beginning as at the end. The way from the penultimate to the ultimate cannot be abandoned. The word remains irreversibly the ultimate; otherwise it would be degraded to something calculable, a commodity, and would be robbed of its essential divinity.16

There are two important aspects here. The first is that the ultimate— the event of a person being justified by grace—is never simply an ‘achieved outcome’. Justification by grace cannot be caused by any effort on the part of humanity, according to Bonhoeffer, but is solely the action of Christ. To attempt to coerce or manufacture this outcome through human effort would turn the ultimate into ‘something calculable, a commodity’. This book has explored what could be described as an outcome-based measurement of Christian youth work, evaluating projects on the basis of numbers of young people transitioning to churches or becoming Christians. Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the ultimate poses a direct challenge to any such approach: to perceive salvation as an outcome achievable through Christian activity, in the manner of something calculable, is to commodify the ultimate, and, in Bonhoeffer’s words, to rob it of its ‘essential divinity’. The second aspect is that the way from the penultimate to the ultimate ‘cannot be abandoned’. Although there is no connection between the  151.

16

118 

P. HILL

penultimate and ultimate in the manner of causation, this does not mean that the penultimate is redundant or unimportant. Rather, the Christian must live life in the world. To downgrade the penultimate, viewing the entirety of life from the perspective of the end of all things—what Bonhoeffer describes as the ‘radical’ approach—would be to abandon the world. It would be to forgo any sense of Christian responsibility, as ‘the world must burn in any case’.17 The danger at the other end of the spectrum is to elevate the penultimate above the ultimate, focusing solely on this world; this is what Bonhoeffer calls the ‘compromise’ perspective. This approach forgets the ultimate and prioritises love and freedom and the creator who preserves and redeems in this life. Neither, alone, offers the solution, as: [b]oth solutions are extreme in the same respect, and likewise both contain truths and falsehoods. They are extreme because they make the penultimate and the ultimate mutually exclusive, sometimes by destroying the penultimate through the ultimate, other times by banishing the ultimate from the domain of the penultimate. In the one case the ultimate cannot come to terms with the penultimate; in the other the penultimate cannot come to terms with the ultimate.18

Both positions take something true and absolutise it to the point of untruth. The radical position absolutises the end and the compromise position absolutises the present. It is not hard to see how these two perspectives—radical and compromise—play out in Christian discourse and ministry. These two perspectives are evident in different approaches to Christian youth work. Those who could be described as radicals might claim that all worldly goods like wellbeing, flourishing, or personal growth in a young person must be secondary to the one true aim of Christian youth work: young people finding Christian faith. They may take this a step further, arguing that pursuing the ends of wellbeing or flourishing are actually in conflict with the true end of sharing faith; this could be said to be prioritising the ultimate at the expense of the penultimate. At the compromise end of the spectrum, Christian youth workers might argue that they just want to love and help young people to flourish and that sharing faith should not get in the way or prevent more practical help like offering  153.  153.

17 18

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

119

a nurturing and welcoming environment or seeking to help young people into work opportunities. This could be said to be prioritising the penultimate at the expense of the ultimate. Somehow the two must be brought together. So how does Bonhoeffer see penultimate action relating to the ultimate? In the language of this book, this is the question of how creating home with young people might enable them to become at home with Christ. If the penultimate is prioritised above the ultimate, then creating home with young people becomes an end in itself, a good that is pursued on its own terms. This could lead to the collapse of an eschatological dimension with regards to how we understand home and a belief that our earthly home is all that there is. At the other end of the spectrum, we might prioritise the ultimate over the penultimate, arguing that the heavenly home is all that matters and that any attempt to make oneself at home on the Earth may actually compromise our ability to be at home with Christ. Both of these are the extremes that Bonhoeffer wishes to avoid. Bonhoeffer is clear that the penultimate is defined and only becomes what it is, gaining its meaning, through the ultimate. For an earthly home to truly be penultimate, there must be a way in which it relates and leads to the arrival of the ultimate home. Something can therefore only be defined as penultimate retrospectively or as it relates to the ultimate which is yet to come. To say that an individual scored the penultimate goal in a football match only makes sense if you know how many goals are scored in total; it is in hindsight that something can truly be defined as penultimate. Despite this, Bonhoeffer writes that the penultimate plays a role in preparing the way for the ultimate. The manner of this preparing is described by Bonhoeffer as the removal of obstacles or hindrances. He elaborates by saying that there are particular experiences in life that can hinder the receiving of grace, making it more difficult to believe. It is not impossible to believe in these circumstances, but challenging circumstances can get in the way. It is the responsibility of the Christian to smooth the way for the coming of grace in other people’s lives, doing away with that which hinders them and preparing the path. In this way, the activity of the Christian in another’s life can be described as penultimate if it prepares the way and clears the path for the ultimate to come. In the midst of his discussion of the relationship between the penultimate and the ultimate, Bonhoeffer articulates several actions that may be described as penultimate. One of these is sharing our home with others:

120 

P. HILL

The hungry person needs bread, the homeless person needs shelter; the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom. It would be blasphemy against God and our neighbour to leave the hungry unfed while saying that God is closest to those in deepest need. We break bread with the hungry and share our home with them for the sake of Christ’s love, which belongs to the hungry as much as it does to us. If the hungry do not come to faith, the guilt falls on those who denied them bread. To bring bread to the hungry is preparing the way for the coming of grace.19 [Emphasis mine]

Here Bonhoeffer places responsibility on the Christian and on whether or not they act to help the one in need. To share one’s home with another for the sake of Christ’s love is seen by Bonhoeffer as preparing the way for the coming of grace, and to fail to share one’s home with another constitutes an ethical omission on their part. In this suggestion, sharing and making home with another who is in need of home is not only a pleasant, friendly action but contains a moral and normative dimension: Christians should create home with others. Just as the Christian may be held accountable for failing to feed a neighbour in distress, equally, to ignore another’s need for home is to be culpable for failing to take responsibility. More than this, as Bonhoeffer establishes in even starker terms, the Christian is also responsible for the individual not coming to faith. Building on what Bonhoeffer writes here, we can broaden the findings from the Youth Hub beyond the particular instance of the drop-in to other contexts. Creating and sharing home is not just something happening at this particular youth club, but is a model for faithful, responsible Christian action in the world. Creating home is, in this sense, penultimate action, if it relates to the ultimate reality that is yet to come. As discussed in Chap. 4, the Youth Hub, to be a healthy home, must be one that young people can move on from. The intention is not just to enable young people to become at home in this particular space, and perhaps to become dependent on it as a consequence, but rather to enable them to become at home in a broader sense in the world and ultimately with God. It must be a home that points beyond itself, for the moment when they inevitably move on at 18. The theological significance of this was hinted at, but now comes into sharp relief through Bonhoeffer’s language of the penultimate and ultimate. Becoming at home is more about  163.

19

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

121

the journey home than offering an end destination. If a youth club home fails to point beyond itself then it is in danger of collapsing—in a Christian ministry paradigm—into what Bonhoeffer describes as the compromised approach, failing to prepare the way for grace to come in young people’s lives. Heidegger’s metaphor of the river captured the dual reality of stability and motion necessary for dwelling and being at home; the river itself dwells and is a location but is also always in motion towards its ultimate end and home. The homecoming venture is like this river, and so must the experience of home at the Youth Hub and other such youth clubs be— providing a home that is stable and yet always pointing beyond itself, a way station along the way.20

Conclusion At the start of this chapter we met youth worker Miriam and her analogy of the weeds and the seeds. In this analogy, she described the necessary work of removing weeds in young people’s lives—the things that hold them back and entangle them—and established that planting seeds is in itself insufficient. She saw two different elements involved in Christian youth work: preparing the ground and sowing seeds. In many ways Miriam’s analogy maps onto Bonhoeffer’s penultimate and ultimate distinction. In a comparable way to Miriam’s description, Bonhoeffer describes the responsibility of the Christian as preparing the way for the coming of grace: this is the weeding, the removal of hindrances that may prevent an individual from receiving grace. Just as with Miriam’s description, the focus is not on weeding for the sake of weeding, but in order to make the planting of seeds possible and the bearing of fruit. This is reflected in Bonhoeffer’s insistence that for the penultimate to truly be penultimate, it must come before and be followed by the ultimate. Bonhoeffer also outlined the compromise and radical approaches to Christian life and ministry, with the compromise approach prioritising the here and now, the penultimate, at the expense of the ultimate, and the radical prioritising the ultimate, what is to come, at the expense of the penultimate. Drawing on Miriam’s analogy again, to prioritise the penultimate is like focusing solely on weeding and making a nice patch of soil, while prioritising the ultimate is like sowing without thought for the 20  This is Nordin’s phrase, see Nordin, Irene Gilsenan. 2002. ‘A Way-Station Along a Way’: Heaney and Heidegger and Wanderings and Home. Nordic Irish Studies 1: 19–29.

122 

P. HILL

context or the environment in which those seeds will land: neither is sufficient on its own. Bonhoeffer’s thinking on the penultimate and ultimate offers a new way of understanding what makes a work ‘Christian’. There is an assumption underlying much thinking in Christian ministry that the Christian ‘bit’ is the faith transmission part: the talking about Jesus part. In his affirmation of penultimate action, Bonhoeffer paves the way for a more nuanced and non-competitive view of the different aspects of ministry; that the Christian is responsible to the other in their concrete humanity, and must take seriously not just the work of sharing Christianity but the person who stands before them, whose context and life experiences will fundamentally shape the extent to which they are able to receive the Christianity professed. This resonates with the way that Miriam sees her own ministry, as more than just talking about faith but removing obstacles in young people’s lives. In practice, it may be challenging to walk the tight-rope between the penultimate and ultimate. It may be all too easy to collapse into one end of the spectrum or the other, falling into the traps of the compromise or radical approaches. Perhaps a subtler danger, given the tendency historically towards means to ends thinking in youth ministry narratives, is that the penultimate simply becomes a means to the end of the ultimate. This would downgrade penultimate actions, such as sharing one’s home, to being relatively inconsequential, and a façade for the ‘real’ work of sharing faith. Bonhoeffer is clear that there is no causal relationship between the penultimate and ultimate: the penultimate does not compel the ultimate. The motivation for penultimate acts therefore differs from means to ends, as they are carried out in mystery, out of love for Christ, and out of responsibility on the part of the Christian to the concrete other. The understanding of sharing home as a penultimate act offers a ‘both/ and’ approach to the aims of a Christian youth work drop-in: the aim is not just that young people might have a home (the compromise perspective) or just that they might become Christians (the radical perspective) but that home is shared with young people as a penultimate act which prepares the way for grace to come in their lives. Bonhoeffer acknowledges and celebrates the ‘third way’ between these two opposing perspectives, offering a theological justification for the meaningfulness of Christian youth work that sits in the third space between these two extremes. There is, in Bonhoeffer’s description, a tangible connection between young

6  MIRIAM: A PENULTIMATE HOME 

123

people’s experiences of home and their ability to experience home with Christ; preparing the way in a young person’s life may be a process of removing that which hinders them. Creating home with young people is therefore not solely the responsibility and calling of the youth workers at the Youth Hub. Rather, it is a calling that all Christians working with young people must take seriously and find ways to implement in practice.

References Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1959. Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3. London: SCM. ———. 2004. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3 (DBWE 3). Ed. J. W. de Gruchy. Trans. D. S. Bax. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2009a. Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology (DBWE 2). Eds. W.  W. Floyd and H-R.  Reuter. Trans. M. H. Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2009b. Lectures on Christology. In Berlin, 1932–1933 (DBWE 12), Ed. L.  L. Rasmussen, 299–360. Trans. I.  Best, D.  Higgins and D.  W. Stott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 3–35. Trans. W.  Lovitt. New  York; Hagerstown; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row. ———. 2011. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, 239–256. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1971. The Origin of the Work of Art. In Poetry, Language, Thought, 15-88. Trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row. Nordin, Irene Gilsenan. 2002. ‘A Way-Station Along a Way’: Heaney and Heidegger and Wanderings and Home. Nordic Irish Studies 1: 19–29. Volf, Miroslav. 2019. The World as God’s Home. Cadbury Lectures. https:// www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/theologyandreligion/ events/cadburylectures/2019/index.aspx. Accessed 9 July 2021. Zimmermann, Jens, and Brian Gregor. 2010. Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications.

CHAPTER 7

Charlotte: A New Vision for Christian Hospitality to Young People

The young people are banging on the door. The team have made some changes recently, and Friday nights are now exclusively for young people in years seven to nine. The young people at the door aren’t in years seven to nine, and so are turned away. I hear a shout of ‘we’re not allowed in!’ from outside. Two boys walk in and start playing pool. One older young person is allowed to walk through to get a drink from the kitchen, and then make his way back outside. There are just four young people in the building at the moment—a young guy and girl as well as the two boys playing pool. I hear more protests from the young people at the door, saying that they ‘hate this rule’. Two of the younger guys in the room ask Freya if we can stop doing this, as the Youth Hub will lose ‘customers’ and people will stop coming. They walk away, and leave soon after that. The room falls quiet as Freya and I stand together. She comments: ‘Young people need to find something else to do with their days apart from coming here’. She says that they can’t become dependent on it, as otherwise in a year or two’s time they won’t have anywhere to go. Freya also explains that her nephew is turning 11 soon, and ‘there’s no way he would come when there are loads of 18 year-old boys’. A young guy walks in and makes his way over to the PlayStation. Freya says to me quietly, ‘And he won’t get bullied today’, gesturing over to the young lad. Eventually there are just four young guys in the living room: three playing PlayStation, and one watching. I pull up a tub seat and join them. They start to explain the rules of Fortnite to me, the game that is playing on repeat. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_7

125

126 

P. HILL

In my peripheral vision, I can see Charlotte through the glass front door, sitting outside. She is looking over at me and I catch her eye. I mouth ‘hey’ and then go back to looking at the PlayStation game the boys are playing. She continues to look over at me and I can feel her gaze. She knows she shouldn’t be here, and can’t come in, but clearly would rather sit outside the door than go anywhere else. Eventually I stand up and walk over to her, opening the front door to say hi. We have a quick chat and catch up on her day. After a few minutes or so I head back inside. Later on I see her sitting on the ground outside the front door with Luke. They remain in that spot for the whole of drop-in: two and a half hours.

Charlotte was my constant companion at the drop-in. Even on nights when she was not supposed to be there—such as the evening above—she would show up without fail, keen for a chat and the chance to share the latest tales from her life. The frustration the young people felt towards the newly imposed age-exclusive nights was evident, and they resisted by leaving, or turning up anyway. For the older ones, the alleyway outside of the drop-in centre was a good enough hang-out spot on these nights; they still got to see their friends and catch up with the leaders. Although the leaders enforced the new rules, they were willing to engage with the older young people outside and did not tell them to leave. I learnt a lot from spending time with Charlotte. When I first began my research, I felt daunted by the prospect of hanging out and engaging with the young people at the drop-in for several hours each evening, particularly given the unstructured nature of the youth work. I suddenly felt very aware of how I was coming across, what I was wearing, whether I would be ‘cool’ enough or interesting to the young people, and whether or not they would accept me. And then I met Charlotte. Despite all of her challenges, it is Charlotte who made me feel at home in the drop-in. Without her, I would have felt alone on many evenings, unsure of how to relate in this brave new world. Through playing pool, chatting with her and her friends, and numerous conversations and catch-ups, she drew me into the social world that the drop-in represents. She noticed when I was not there (one time assuming that I must be pregnant as the only feasible explanation of my absence) and made me ‘get well soon’ cards when I was ill. She made me Christmas cards, saying how thankful she was for me. Like a native interpreter, she taught me about Snapchat and showed me how to do things with my phone that I did not think possible. It is experiences such as these that demonstrate the true mutuality of the drop-in space: in many ways, I needed Charlotte more than she needed me.

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

127

This highlights something important about the power dynamics of open access youth work. Unlike other more structured types of youth work, which may be targeted or project-based, unstructured work shifts the balance of power in the youth work relationship. For example, if I was to stand at the front of the room where young people had gathered and ask them to be quiet before leading a session, that would create a certain kind of dynamic. The youth work relationship in this scenario would be closer to a teacher-student relationship, where there are certain expectations of behaviour and young people are asked to sit and listen to what the leader is saying. In an open access environment like the drop-in, young people are free to come and go as they please, to talk to the leaders or not to talk to the leaders, and to participate or not participate in any set activities. They engage with the environment on their own terms. This establishes a very different power dynamic; the leader holds less power in these settings. My experience of feeling daunted by the environment and concerned about whether or not I would be ‘cool’ enough for the young people reflects this shift in power; the young people do not have to talk to me if they do not want to. As Bernard Davies summarises: ‘Though the action may never be framed in this way by either adult or young person, each knows that at any point the young person, simply by walking away, may leave the adult powerless in the relationship.’1 In open access projects like this one, the redistributing of power can be intentional. The implicit power dynamics of the youth work relationship are an important and prominent part of the conversation around what it means to do good youth work in secular spaces.2 This does not seem to be the case in the discourse on Christian youth work; power is simply not on the radar in the same way. And yet questions of power are even more crucial in Christian work with young people. One of the often unspoken dynamics of Christian youth work is the discrepancy between the youth leaders and young people when it comes to social and racial demographics. As already mentioned, at the Youth Hub, the majority of the youth workers were Christian, white, and middle class, while many of the young people were from black or minority ethnic groups, from different religions, 1  Davies, Bernard. 2015. Youth Work: A Manifesto for Our Times – Revisited. Youth and Policy 114: 96–117 (101). 2  Empowerment is a key principle of statutory youth work (see e.g. Local Government Association. Six key principles for effective youth services. In Bright Futures: Our Vision for Youth Services. https://www.local.gov.uk/about/campaigns/bright-futures/brightfutures-childrens-services/bright-futures-our-vision-youth-0. Accessed 9 July 2021.).

128 

P. HILL

and from working-class backgrounds. Given the colonial past of Christian missional work, the urgency of taking seriously the power dynamics in these settings cannot be overstated. Although this is a simplistic rendering of a complex situation, and undoubtedly the organisation is doing what it can to employ a wider range and diversity of volunteers and leaders, it is ultimately the present reality and cannot be ignored. There is more work to be done to interrogate how power can, to borrow Davies’s term, be ‘tipped’3 in the direction of the young people who attend, mindful of the historical and current dynamics of power that cast a shadow over all Christian work with young people. To create home with young people we must be sensitive to these dynamics of power and the ways in which the manner of our hospitality may serve to challenge or strengthen them. In the last chapter, Bonhoeffer’s notions of Christ as the rediscovered boundary at the centre and the penultimate nature of sharing one’s home with others were explored. Creating home with young people shifted into a normative dimension, from being a reality at this particular drop-in to being something Christians should be doing with and for young people. This chapter will tease out the implications of Bonhoeffer’s thinking on boundary for how we might offer hospitality to young people without disempowering them in the process. Through this discussion, the distinctive nature of open access youth work specifically will be highlighted, and how it might offer a different—and possibly more faithful—form of hospitality to young people than other more targeted forms of Christian youth work.

The Power Dynamics of Hospitality Many of the older youth struggled with the changes made to the drop-in sessions. Moments like these reveal the power that the Christian youth worker has as the host of the drop-in home: they ultimately have the power to decide who can attend and who cannot, how the evenings will be structured, when the doors will be opened, who is banned, and when changes need to be brought in. This is in many ways appropriate, as the youth workers are adults employed to manage the drop-in environment and ensure first and foremost that the young people are safe. But it also reveals something important about the nature of hospitality and the implicit power dynamics of welcoming another person into your home. 3

 Davies. Youth Work: A Manifesto for Our Times—Revisited. 103.

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

129

Philosopher Jacques Derrida identifies a problem lying at the heart of hospitality. In a paper titled ‘Hostipitality’, Derrida highlights the paradox of sharing one’s home with others. Derrida explains that the host, the one offering hospitality, must be the ‘master’ of the house. He writes: It does not seem to me that I am able to open up or offer hospitality, however generous, even in order to be generous, without reaffirming: this is mine, I am at home, you are welcome in my home, without any implication of ‘make yourself at home’ but on condition that you observe the rules of hospitality by respecting the being-at-home of my home.4

Even with the best intentions, Derrida acknowledges that offering hospitality to others in some way reaffirms the identity of host as host. To be able to open up your home to another person is to say—albeit unintentionally—that you own a home and that the other is welcome into that home on your terms. The other is welcome, and able to make themselves at home in your home, to the extent that they abide by the ‘conditions’ of being a guest in your home. Because of this, hospitality, according to Derrida, ‘does the opposite of what it pretends to do’.5 It seeks to welcome, but in the process of doing so actually initiates the other’s identity as stranger and guest in your home. True hospitality is therefore impossible; this is the paradox of hospitality for Derrida. Being impossible does not necessarily mean that hospitality should be abandoned. Although true hospitality may always be hampered in its task to welcome the other and will always be in some way conditional, it still serves an important function. As Penelope Deutscher writes, all flawed acts of hospitality ‘take place only in the shadow of the impossibility of their ideal version’.6 The impossible ideal of hospitality and unconditional welcome stand over any hospitable act, always asking whether or not more can be given, and a less conditional form of hospitality offered. An important distinction comes in here for Derrida between the ‘hospitality of invitation’ and the ‘hospitality of visitation’. With the former, I offer hospitality to a guest who is invited to my home at a particular date and time. They are guests I have chosen to invite above others and ones that I might look forward to receiving. The latter—the hospitality of visitation—involves a 4  Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Hostipitality. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 3–18 (14). 5  Derrida. Hostipitality. 14. 6  Deutscher, Penelope. 2005. How to Read Derrida. London: Granta Books. 68.

130 

P. HILL

stranger who shows up unannounced at my door. I have neither invited them nor am I expecting them. They have simply decided to arrive at my home, presenting me with the question of whether I will welcome them in, or ask them to come back at another time. There is an importantly different dynamic in these two forms of hospitality. In the first case, I invite the other as a guest into my home under certain conditions—such as when they are expected to arrive—and they are invited on my terms. In the second case, I lose some of my power as host as the stranger arrives at my door on their terms. As Rafael Winkler clarifies: ‘This experience, which unsettles the identity of the host qua host, as if he [sic] suffered a symbolic death and became the guest received in his own home by the other, is the impossible event of justice.’7 The implication here is that this form of hospitality compromises my authority as host; I am also, in some senses, a guest and a stranger, as the other who visits me is. There is therefore a sense in which the hospitality of visitation—a willingness to receive whomever may come, whether friend or enemy—is a less conditional form of hospitality than the hospitality of invitation. To practice this form of hospitality, Derrida explains, ‘I must be unprepared, or prepared to be unprepared, for the unexpected arrival of any other’.8 This unsettling of the identity of the host as host pushes hospitality into a more authentic, less conditional form. It is in this way that the impossible ideal of hospitality, and the question of whether a less conditional form of hospitality can be offered, serves an important role. Derrida’s understanding of hospitality is undeniably Western and characteristic of recent times. Historically, and in other parts of the world today, hospitality may be understood very differently, with alternative power dynamics between the guest and the host. The ancient practice of hospitality, as articulated in the Old and New Testaments, placed onus on the host to welcome the foreigners and strangers in their midst, providing them with food, shelter, and protection.9 There was a sense of obligation to the unexpected guest, affording them privileges that a host may not even offer to neighbours or friends. We see an example of this in Rahab’s 7  Winkler, Rafael. 2017. Dwelling and Hospitality: Heidegger and Hölderlin. Research in Phenomenology 47, 3: 366–87 (369). 8  Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds R.  Kearney and M. Dooley, 65–83. London; New York: Routledge. 70. 9  For more on Early Christian hospitality, see Arterbury, Andrew. 2005. Entertaining Angels: Early Christian Hospitality in its Mediterranean Setting. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix.

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

131

protection of the spies in the book of Joshua, where she takes on great personal risk in order to look after the men and provide a way out of the city through her window. In the Christian tradition, there is a conviction that by welcoming the unknown visitor, the host will be blessed. In a similar vein, in the book of Genesis we find Abraham eager to welcome the three unexpected guests who arrive at his tent. Unbeknownst to Abraham, the guests are God or angels of God (the passage is ambiguous), and in return for his kind hospitality Abraham’s elderly wife Sarah becomes pregnant with a child. Hebrews 13:1–2 spells out the responsibility of the Christian clearly: ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’10 There is a shift in power in these examples. Rather than the host being the sole bestower of a blessing, there is a sense in which the stranger who arrives and receives hospitality also brings a blessing. There is also a responsibility on the part of the host to open up their home to the unexpected traveller. In this way, the uninvited guest holds some of the power in the relationship, as to fail to fulfil the duty of welcoming the stranger would be unthinkable in these moments. More than this, the unexpected visitor takes on a quasi-divine role in the encounter. The arrival of the stranger is the arrival of God in potentia, and to miss this may be to miss the arrival of God himself. With the Emmaus Road encounter of Luke 24, it is Jesus who is the stranger arriving unannounced. The passage tells the story of two men walking home together, disappointed by the events that have unfolded in Jerusalem. They are joined on the road by the risen Jesus, but do not recognise him; his identity is concealed from them. This is emphasised by their description of him as a ‘visitor’ to Jerusalem—the Greek term παροικεῖς [paroikeis]. To be a paroikia, Andrew Rumsey explains, is to be a stranger, someone who lives or finds themselves within the city walls but does not belong.11 Arriving at their house, the two insist that Jesus stay with them as it is getting dark, and, through the breaking of bread, his true identity is revealed. They leave their house immediately, returning on the road they had just walked back to Jerusalem in order to tell the other disciples. The two men have no idea who Jesus is or where he has come from. And yet they welcome him into their home, not accepting his suggestion that he needs to travel on. They want him to stay with them and are  ESV.  Rumsey, Andrew. 2017. Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place. London: SCM Press. 3.

10 11

132 

P. HILL

persistent in their desire to fulfil their obligation to him. Through this act of welcoming the stranger in their midst and through sitting down together to eat and break bread, the two encounter God himself. This is the fullest embodiment of the challenge in Hebrews to welcome the stranger. This vision of hospitality to the stranger requires a shift in perspective towards the other who arrives unannounced. It propels a posture of openness towards encounters with others that may at any time, or at any moment, turn out to be encounters with God. The rest of this chapter will delve into the nature of hospitality at the drop-in, and how and in what ways ‘more’ can be given, and a less conditional form of hospitality offered to young people. Firstly, though, we shall revisit Bonhoeffer’s discussion of boundary and its potential out-workings for a theology of hospitality.

Boundary and Home: A Theological Perspective A key aspect of any youth work provision is managing behaviour and setting boundaries. There are only a few rules that young people are expected to follow at the drop-in, including no swearing, no play-fighting, no drugs, and no knives. These rules are introduced to the young people when they arrive for the first time at the centre and exist to keep the young people safe. Held in tension with the boundaries and stemming from the desire not to give up on young people who may have experienced disengagement from other services, the staff are reluctant to ban young people. Historically, young people who have been banned have sometimes stopped coming to the drop-in entirely. In some cases, this may have contributed to negative outcomes for the young person. On one occasion at the drop-in, a 15-year-old girl showed up after having been absent for a while. She was very pregnant. Talking with youth leader Hannah, it turned out that she used to come to the drop-in regularly but started getting into fights and eventually had to be banned. She had never returned, until this particular evening. According to Hannah, her boyfriend—and the father of her child—was ‘bad news’. Evidently, this situation could have occurred with or without the Youth Hub’s continued involvement and cannot simplistically be labelled as a ‘negative outcome’. However, this scenario reveals the potential impact of banning a young person, who may well need, more than most, the support that the drop-in can offer. The staff therefore feel a responsibility to manage how young people are banned and their re-integration to the drop-in.

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

133

Moving now to think of the relationship between boundaries and home, there are a few elements at play. The first is that, as we saw in the previous chapter, without boundary there would be no home; boundaries establish the parameters of a home and in some senses bring it into existence. If there are no walls and windows demarcating one home from the outside world, it ceases to be a home at all. However, as Derrida highlights, ‘as soon as there are a door and windows, it means that someone has the key to them and consequently controls the conditions of hospitality’.12 The youth workers at the drop-in have the keys to the drop­in doors and ultimately therefore control the conditions of hospitality for young people coming into the space. Such controls and conditions may well be needed in order to ensure that young people remain safe, but there is a tension to be navigated here—felt acutely by the staff—between welcome and boundary. What might Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Christ as the boundary at the centre have to say here? According to Bonhoeffer, when Adam and Eve ate from the tree they really became like God: sicut deus. Rather than being oriented around the boundary at the centre, which was their limit and their freedom, they became their own centre; an ontological shift occurred in their being. The outcome of this is that they are sent away from the Garden of Eden, excluded from the privileged relationship with God they had enjoyed. Although Bonhoeffer explains that it is humankind, not the boundary, who have moved, boundary takes on a new reality and meaning after the Fall: the gates of Eden are ‘shut’. The true boundary which was central has now been replaced by boundaries of defence, of possession, and of exclusion at the edge and margins of life. Rather than being defined by relationship to the ultimate boundary, humankind is now forced to define and defend itself on the ‘cursed’ ground on which it lives. Humankind is now excluded from home—from life lived with the boundary at the centre—and seeks to make itself at home, but cannot. In lieu of the true boundary, humanity tries to make itself at home by possessing, by dominating, and by erecting boundaries which include and exclude. It is only when Christ moves onto the ground on which we now stand that the way of being creature on the Earth, oriented around the true boundary at the centre and at home once again, is opened up. The question then is what living in the reality of the reconfigured boundary at the centre might look like at the Youth Hub drop-in. If all  Derrida. Hostipitality. 14.

12

134 

P. HILL

things are reoriented around Christ the newfound boundary, then boundaries of possession and exclusion belong to the old, former way. In the new way of being, initiated and brought about through Christ’s redemptive action, the boundaries of possession and exclusion are no more; there is only one boundary—Christ Himself—who stands at the centre of our existence. Rediscovering the boundary at the centre restores humanity’s original relationship with the Earth. Bonhoeffer articulates this restored relationship as the Church possessing the Earth as a foreigner. What does it mean to possess something as a foreigner? One way of describing this relationship with the Earth might be to describe it as a ‘gift’;13 a gift is never owned but simply received. Although the receiver in some senses now possesses the gift, this is only on account of the giving of the other. The true manner of humanity’s relationship to the Earth is therefore as a steward, caring for and tending that which it does not possess. As Bonhoeffer identifies, seeking to live as stewards on the Earth is a delicate balance of living with God-given dominion without ‘seizing it for ourselves’.14 In practical terms at the drop-in, this may simply elicit a shift in perspective. If our right relationship to the Earth as Christians is as stewards, then the drop-in is not ‘owned’ by the organisation or staff members. The drop-in centre and resources are gifts, given by God, to use carefully and responsibly. The young people, for whom it is intended, therefore do not possess the drop-in either, but have as much claim and as much ‘ownership’ to the space as do the leaders. The barriers which can be erected, implicitly or explicitly, to include and exclude certain attendees must be challenged; although the drop-in staff have a responsibility to keep young people safe, it is not for the leaders to decide who can attend and who cannot. Perhaps more than anything, this may evoke an intentionality and a desire to make people feel genuinely at ‘home’, stemming from a core belief that the drop-in is—in an un-tokenistic sense—their space as much as it is the organisation’s. Wanting young people to have a sense of 13  In a famous debate between Marion and Derrida, the distinction between the givenness and being given as gift is highlighted (see Derrida, J., J. L. Marion, and R. Kearney. 1999. On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Moderated by Richard Kearney. In God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. J. D. Caputo and M. J. Scanlon, 54–78. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.). Like hospitality, the gift is another ‘impossible’ category for Derrida. 14  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2004. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3 (DBWE 3). Ed. John W. de Gruchy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 66–7.

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

135

ownership over a provision is characteristic of open access youth work, but less so of more targeted provisions. Bonhoeffer’s reconfigured boundary offers a theological imperative behind such work. In Christian youth work, however, implicit power dynamics between leaders and young people can resist the realisation of this reality; power will be the focus of the next section. This does not mean, however, that a drop-in type provision is boundless. It may be assumed, given what has been discussed about Christ as the boundary at the centre, that challenging young people’s behaviour, or banning them from the drop-in, compromises the new reality or follows the old pattern of exclusion and possession. Offering unconditional welcome is, as Derrida makes plain, an impossibility and may also not be healthy in a drop-in context. If the drop-in had no boundaries, and no option for asking young people to leave if they were presenting a threat to others, it would not be a safe place for young people. Bonhoeffer also presents an unusual understanding of the connection between boundaries and relationships. To encounter the other is to encounter a concrete boundary, as the other places a ‘limit’ on me;15 to be in relationship is therefore to be boundaried by the other. As Andrew Root elaborates, what young people need is real relationships, and real relationships are boundaried.16 There is a required ‘closedness’ to the youth work relationship, in order that the youth worker is acknowledged as a human being and not a possession.17 To experience a genuine relationship with a youth work provision, the young person must therefore experience it as a place of boundaries. If the drop-in was devoid of boundaries then it would not facilitate a genuine relationship; it would be a place that young people could use however they liked, without limit. Some of the young people may resent this limit and stop coming, as it may feel as though it is an affront to their freedom, their control, and their ability to do what they want. However, all of us need to have our limitlessness affronted if we are to return to an authentic way of being and becoming at home. What has emerged through this exploration are two very different kinds of boundary. In Bonhoeffer’s account there is the true boundary, the  Bonhoeffer. Creation and Fall. 99.  Root, Andrew. 2007. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press. 119. 17  Root. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry. 119. 15 16

136 

P. HILL

boundary of relationship, which stands at the centre of the Garden of Eden and is rediscovered through Christ’s redemptive act. Then there are false boundaries erected after the Fall, where humanity’s relationship with God is ruptured and they are now alone, without limit but also without relationship; these are the boundaries at the edge, the boundaries of possession and exclusion. The former boundary—the true boundary—is one that brings freedom and relationship, and is fundamentally re-humanising. The latter boundary initiates separation and exclusion, as humanity defines itself by its own limit at the edge of its existence. This is a boundary that dehumanises, that represents and perpetuates a loss of humanity and the loss of life lived oriented around the true centre. The former boundary is the original way, and the way opened up once again through Christ. The latter boundary is the way of the world, the way of life lived outside of the order established by God for the whole of creation. The challenge here for the drop-in community, and for all Christian youth work spaces, is whether or not the boundaries established are ones that humanise or dehumanise. If they are boundaries established in order to bring about and restore right relationship with the young people who come—and in order that the young people might respect their own humanity, the humanity of the other young people, and the humanity of the leaders—then they are boundaries of the new way established through Christ and entirely appropriate and right to enforce. If, however, they are boundaries of the old way of the world—excluding certain young people, dominating or asserting the leaders’ possession over the drop-in space and their authority to decide how things are run, or ones that do not uphold and restore the humanity of the young people who come—then they are boundaries of the old, worldly way. Such projects will fail to be restorative spaces, drawing young people back to their full humanity.

Power and Hospitality at the Drop-in The way in which boundaries are practiced at the drop-in will serve either to challenge or to reinforce the implicit power imbalance of the youth work relationship and of hospitality more generally. The way in which young people are welcomed and included, and the way in which inclusion and welcome are talked about, betrays a particular understanding and practice of boundaries. Linn Tonstad identifies a problem with the Church’s discourse around welcoming the other and challenges the

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

137

prevalent ‘inclusion’ narrative. Writing specifically in relation to the Church’s welcome of LGBTQ+ people, she explains: Mainline churches’ response to homosexuality usually focuses on issues of inclusion of the other, a logic that extends rather than challenges normative distributions of power and recognition: the justice of sanctioning marriage and ordination for gays and lesbians. Theologically, this dominant discourse of inclusion is often based in sloganeering about God’s love for everyone, where an implicit theology of creation (the Christian version of ‘born this way’) grounds positive affirmation of the identity of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. Willed extension to others of a privilege already enjoyed oneself leaves ethics in the hands of the powerful. […] This approach denies a real reconfiguration of structures of power and exclusion.18

Although speaking from a different field—namely, the Church’s inclusion of LGBTQ+ people—Tonstad’s logic has much to say to the present discussion of hospitality. As Tonstad highlights, to talk about ‘including’ others implies that you hold and retain the power, deciding whom to include and how they must act in order to be included. In a similar way with hospitality, to talk of ‘welcoming the stranger’ or welcoming young people implies that you are the host and have the power to welcome the other—or not to welcome them—as guest. Simply extending the privilege of welcoming in this way does nothing to challenge the power relationship between the Church and those outside of it. Tonstad is rallying for a reconfiguration of these structures of power and exclusion in the Church community, as opposed to an extension of the ‘normative distributions of power’. The question then is: how do we welcome others in a way that reconfigures power? If possible, this would address the problem posed by Derrida, the problem of hospitality as an act which unwittingly reinforces the power of the host as host. Tonstad concludes that the only option is to abandon the language of inclusion entirely, conceding that it cannot be salvaged from the discourse in which it is steeped. Must we also therefore abandon the language of hospitality and welcoming the other? It does seem that the more phrases like ‘welcoming the stranger’ are used, the more the notion that the Christian is host and the other is guest will be ingrained. Perhaps Christians must talk instead about ‘extending the 18   Tonstad, Linn Marie. 2016. God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude. New York; London: Routledge. 256.

138 

P. HILL

welcome’ or ‘sharing our common home’ with those to whom it already rightly belongs, rather than including, welcoming, or being hospitable. For as we have seen, there are no boundaries at the edge of the home established through Christ. The Christian simply receives this home as a guest of Christ, and the Christian home is therefore theologically speaking a home for guests and strangers. As Rumsey summarises, the Church is ‘the fellowship of strangers, the community of non-belongers, who found their place in Christ’.19 Perhaps such an abandonment is unmerited, however. After all, hospitality has good intentions, even if it may ultimately fail in what it intends to do. Taking heed of these challenges may push Christian hospitality into the ‘more’ of which Derrida writes and move the Christian towards a less conditional welcome, one that reconfigures power. It is here that Derrida’s distinction between the invited guest and the unexpected stranger who arrives unannounced proves significant; the former of these is a more conditional form of welcome and does nothing to disrupt the power and authority of the host, while the latter shifts the balance of power. One way that a Christian can practise offering hospitality in a way that reconfigures power and moves the needle towards a less conditional form of welcome is to be open to the unsettling of their host identity and to being disrupted by the visitor who arrives unannounced. The ‘drop-in’ and open access nature of the Youth Hub reflects an element of this hospitality of visitation. Despite retaining certain conditions—such as the age range of attendance and the opening hours—the drop-in is a place that welcomes the unknown young visitor who may show up when they like and leave when they like. In other words, there are minimal ‘conditions’ of entry and the young people are able to arrive and leave on their own terms. In this case, the Christian youth worker could be said to be, in Derrida’s words, ‘prepared to be unprepared’ to welcome any young person who chooses to show up. An element of this preparing to be unprepared was evident in the opening extract. Charlotte and Luke showed up on an evening when they were not allowed into the drop-in. In this particular instance, Charlotte and Luke were not invited guests; they knew that they should not be there, but arrived nonetheless. On this evening, staff would occasionally hold the door open—as I did—talking to Charlotte and Luke and engaging them in the activities happening inside. The two would chat to other young  Rumsey. Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place. 3.

19

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

139

people as they arrived. The fact that they were not asked to leave but were allowed to stay sitting outside of the drop-in building is an important factor; the way this evening pans out is, to some extent, on their terms. Although it was not necessarily the youth leaders’ intention that older young people would attend on this particular evening, their decision to allow them to stay and to include them in the activities reveals at least to some degree a willingness to be disrupted and that they were prepared to welcome whomever may show up. In my encounter with Charlotte on this particular evening, although I was occupied playing PlayStation with some of the younger boys, I could feel her looking at me and calling out to me, disrupting my intentions for that moment. Despite being the Christian youth worker and host, she had some power over me; I felt obliged to leave what I was doing and to go to see her at the door. In this moment with Charlotte, it is almost as if it is she who welcomes and hosts me, as a guest, as opposed to the other way around. Beyond simply disrupting my authority as host, and, as Derrida describes it, the ‘conditions’ of hospitality that the youth leaders expect the young people to abide by, there is a sense in which the balance of power shifts; it is ‘tipped’ in Charlotte’s favour.20 This tipping of power could be said to come close to Tonstad’s call for the reconfiguring of power. Revisiting the ancient custom of hospitality as outlined earlier from the Old and New Testaments, and the way in which the unexpected visitor takes on a quasi-divine role in the Christian tradition, there is more to be said here about Charlotte’s arrival at the door. There is precedent for the notion that a youth minister can ‘be Christ’ to a young person,21 and often the expected dynamic is that the youth worker ‘ministers’ to the young person who is in need. Perhaps the opposite is also true. The young person who arrives at the door, unexpected and unannounced, is the paroikos, the unknown stranger, just as Jesus was. And, just as Cleopas and his friend had no idea about the true identity of this stranger, and Abraham had no clue who he was welcoming to his tent, so too do we as Christian youth workers have no real idea of who it is that we welcome. All we know is that by welcoming the unexpected young stranger, we may well be welcoming Christ.  Davies. Youth Work: A Manifesto for Our Times—Revisited. 103.  See Pimlott, Jo, Nigel Pimlott and Stuart Murray. 2008. Youth Work after Christendom: Church, Mission and Working with Young People in a Post-Christendom Age. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Chapter 2. 20 21

140 

P. HILL

The Conditionality of the Church’s Work with Young People Open access spaces like the drop-in are increasingly rare and yet they offer an opportunity for Christians to practise and create a way for young people to visit on their own terms. There appears to be a real difference between open access provisions and targeted provisions with regard to the nature of welcome offered; according to Derrida’s distinction, targeted provisions invite young people as guests, as the welcome is offered with particular conditions, whereas open access projects welcome young people as unexpected visitors. Here the power dynamics of targeted and open access provisions are crystallised. Targeted provisions, where young people are invited as guests under certain conditions, allow the youth leader and organisation to play ‘host’ and retain the power that being a host entails. On the other hand, open access provisions in which the youth leaders are ‘prepared to be unprepared’ for the visitation of young people can unsettle the host status of the youth leaders and organisation, disrupting the power that they hold over the conditions by which young people may participate. Open access projects may therefore be closer, in practice, to offering young people an unconditional welcome—or at least a less conditional form of hospitality—than targeted provisions. A truly unconditional welcome is an impossibility, but an open access provision may push into the ‘more’ that is provoked by the impossible ideal. There is a broader challenge here for the institutional Church in whether or not it places conditions on the welcome it offers to young people. In the introduction, a brief survey of the literature on youth ministry revealed that the rightful aim of the Church’s work with young people is not perceived to be social action, or welcoming young people, but transmission of Christian faith. Where this aim has not been achieved, provisions are deemed to be ineffective. Reframing this aim using the language of ‘conditions’, it is evident that the Church’s offering to young people can reflect a conditional form of hospitality. Young people are welcomed in to Christian youth work provisions, but are ultimately expected to attend a church, or become Christians, as a ‘condition’ of this welcome and provision being offered. In this scenario, the Church is playing host and the young person is the invited guest. If the young person does not, as Derrida describes, ‘observe the rules of hospitality by respecting the

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

141

being-at-home of my home’,22 then the welcome may be retracted or the provision terminated. The Church is not willing, in this case, to be compromised in its authority as host. The decline of young people’s attendance at Church, and the desire for there to be more young people in churches, is evident across the board.23 However, the unavoidable question is: does the Church really wish to welcome young people on their terms? The Church is considered to be one the biggest providers of services to young people in the UK.24 In the midst of cuts to provisions in the statutory sector, the Church is faced with the question of whether or not it will choose to fill the gap, putting its money and resources into providing open access spaces for young people. If the only rightful aim of the Church’s work with young people is passing on faith, then, without a compelling theological vision for why the Church should welcome young people on their own terms, it is understandable that other more ‘effective’ approaches will be adopted than provisions like the drop-in. I suspect that this will ultimately mean numerically effective projects—namely, numbers of young people converting to Christianity. Without a broader vision, it is likely that given the many pressures facing the Church’s work with young people, existing projects will close. Sadly, this may well be the form of conditional hospitality to young people that persists in youth ministry and church settings; we are only willing to offer these spaces if they lead to prescribed outcomes, or if young people become, act, or are a certain way as a consequence of them.

Conclusion The interaction with Charlotte and Luke on this particular evening at the drop-in brings into focus the tension between welcoming young people and keeping them safe. The safety of young people was evidently behind  Derrida. Hostipitality. 14.  The Church of England is seeking to double the numbers of young people in UK churches over the next ten years, see Davies, Madeleine. 2021. Synod to Discuss Target of 10,000 New Lay-led Churches in the Next Ten Years. Church Times, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/2-july/news/uk/synod-to-discuss-target-of-10-000-new-layled-churches-in-the-next-ten-years. Accessed 9 July 2021. 24  Howell, David, and Paul Fenton. 2016. Report of the Consultation: Christian Youth Work and Ministry across the UK. http://www.cte.org.uk/Publisher/File.aspx?ID=182924. Accessed 9 July 2021. 22 23

142 

P. HILL

the decision to split up the different age groups across different nights of the week—emphasised by Freya’s comments about bullying and younger youth feeling able to attend—but was hard to accept for the older young people, and was resisted and challenged by them. In this sense, an unconditional welcome, without any boundaries, is an impossibility at the drop­in. However, in its design, the drop-in intends to be an open space for young people, one they attend on their own terms. In this sense it offers a less conditional welcome than, say, a self-harm project in a school might, as there are no conditions by which young people are eligible to participate and no expectations on their involvement. In Charlotte’s interactions with the leaders and with me, there was a sense in which she embodied and practised the mutuality of the youth work relationship in the drop-in; although the youth leaders retained their host status, determining who could come in and who could not, her presence at the door served to disrupt this host status. This disruption was positive as it revealed a different power relation than may be present in other youth work settings and reflected the intentional tipping of power practised in the drop-in space more generally. Underlying much of this chapter has been the question of who it is that bestows a blessing on the other in a ministry relationship. The predominant paradigm in youth ministry is that young people need the Church, because without the Church they will not encounter Jesus. As Thompson highlights, there may also be an institutional agenda at play here and an internal organisational fear about the future of the Church: it needs young people to join in order to sustain the institution and finance its operations in the future.25 What is missing, however, is a sense that the Church needs young people because it is through them that it will encounter and meet with Jesus. What a different posture this would initiate in its work with young people. How much less conditional might the welcome be if this was truly taken seriously. How differently might young people like Charlotte be perceived, if they were welcomed as one would welcome Christ. And so we end this final chapter with a challenge for the Church and a very practical answer to the question: what then should we do? First is the challenge of why Christians approach work with young people in this particular way, only willing to invest in provisions if the desired outcomes are 25  Thompson, Naomi. 2018. Young People and Church since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion London; New York: Routledge. 21.

7  CHARLOTTE: A NEW VISION FOR CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY TO YOUNG… 

143

present. More broadly speaking, the Church engages with feeding the hungry, believing it is the right thing to do; the Church does not stop feeding the hungry if they do not convert to Christianity. Yet it seems that Christian youth work is perceived differently from other forms of Christian activity and mission; the welcome offered in this case may well be retracted if the young people do not perform or respond in a certain way. The Church needs to develop a strong conviction of the importance of extending the welcome of Christ to young people. Christians are called to offer a less conditional form of hospitality, one that reconfigures power relations and one that is offered whatever the young people decide to do with their welcome. The second element, in response to the question of what we should do, is perhaps simpler. We must welcome young people on their terms. We must find ways of pushing into the ‘more’ that Derrida speaks of, seeking wherever possible to place less and less conditions on the welcome that is offered to young people through provisions. We must capture a vision for the importance and distinctive nature of projects like the drop-in, which facilitate a different kind of welcome and enable a shift in power relations between youth workers and young people. We must be mindful of the ways in which we practise boundaries in youth work, ensuring that the boundaries we establish are reflective of the new way established in Christ, and not the old way. We must begin to see young people as the bringers of a blessing and the arrival of God in potentia, rather than assuming we can ‘be Jesus’ to them. And, as a consequence, we must acknowledge that we may need young people more than we have ever realised, not to prop up the future of the Church, but because if we fail to welcome them, we may fail to encounter Jesus himself.

References Arterbury, Andrew. 2005. Entertaining Angels: Early Christian Hospitality in Its Mediterranean Setting. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2004. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3 (DBWE 3), ed. J.  W. de Gruchy and Trans. D.  S. Bax. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Davies, Bernard. 2015. Youth Work: A Manifesto for Our Times  – Revisited. Youth and Policy 114: 96–117. Davies, Madeleine. 2021. Synod to Discuss Target of 10,000 New Lay-Led Churches in the Next Ten Years. Church Times. https://www.churchtimes.

144 

P. HILL

co.uk/articles/2021/2-­july/news/uk/synod-­to-­discuss-­target-­of-­10-­000-­ new-­lay-­led-­churches-­in-­the-­next-­ten-­years. Accessed 9 July 2021. Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. R. Kearney and M. Dooley, 65–83. London; New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. Hostipitality. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities: 3–18. Derrida, J., J.L. Marion, and R. Kearney. 1999. On the Gift: A Discussion Between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Moderated by Richard Kearney. In God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. J.D.  Caputo and M.J.  Scanlon, 54–78. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Deutscher, Penelope. 2005. How to Read Derrida. London: Granta Books. Howell, David, and Paul Fenton. 2016. Report of the Consultation: Christian Youth Work and Ministry across the UK. http://www.cte.org.uk/Publisher/ File.aspx?ID=182924. Accessed 9 July 2021. Local Government Association. Six Key Principles for Effective Youth Services. In Bright Futures: Our Vision for Youth Services. https://www.local.gov.uk/ about/campaigns/bright-­futures/bright-­futures-­childrens-­services/bright-­ futures-­our-­vision-­youth-­0. Accessed 9 July 2021. Pimlott, Jo, Nigel Pimlott, and Stuart Murray. 2008. Youth Work After Christendom: Church, Mission and Working with Young People in a Post-Christendom Age. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Root, Andrew. 2007. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Rumsey, Andrew. 2017. Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place. London: SCM Press. Thompson, Naomi. 2018. Young People and Church Since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion. London; New York: Routledge. Tonstad, Linn Marie. 2016. God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude. New York; London: Routledge. Winkler, Rafael. 2017. Dwelling and Hospitality: Heidegger and Hölderlin. Research in Phenomenology 47 (3): 366–387.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Finding Home

I already feel a bit sad about my new regime of life. I had been looking forward to September, when the intensive period of my fieldwork at the drop-in would be over and I would be able to focus on the ‘real work’ of my research. I relished the thought of sitting at my laptop most days and saw the intensive fieldwork as a patch I needed to get through before being able to crack on with the stuff I most enjoy. But then I started attending the drop-in four days a week. It was knackering, yes, but exhilarating too. I began to feel part of it, in a way that I hadn’t before; no longer was I someone the young people and leaders would occasionally see and have brief catch-ups with but someone to share life with. I shared numerous lunch times, meetings, walks to town, trips away, and drop-in sessions with them. I felt, and I feel, part of it. They let me in and we bonded quickly. I’m not sure I’ve laughed as hard as I did when Mark couldn’t fit into his sleeping bag on the Survival School trip, or had as much fun as when we had a nerf gun war in the drop-in with the year-nine boys. We’ve shared many wonderful moments, often made more hilarious by tiredness. And the young people! I have grown incredibly attached to some of them. I want to know how they are. What if I don’t see them again? Maybe it’s a good thing to have some distance. Maybe I need that as a researcher. But part of me wishes I could be there instead of here. I miss them all. There’s something electric about the place—maybe that’s why everyone who visits comments on the atmosphere of the Youth Hub being different. I’ve tasted the glory of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_8

145

146 

P. HILL

this community of people and I love them. Perhaps more profoundly, they love me too. —Throughout my doctoral research, I kept an ethnographic journal with reflections on the research process and emerging thoughts and findings. This was one such entry.

The real work of this book, as I had begun to realise in this journal entry, was the time that I spent at the drop-in. The truth is that not only did I witness the home reality being experienced and performed by the Christian youth workers and young people, but I was swept up into it. Despite being an outsider, with foreign objectives and research aims, I was welcomed as one of their own. I was loved. And their home became my home, too. At the heart of this book are the Christian youth workers and young people at the drop-in. All of the theory and theology around home has flowed from and is ultimately rooted in the lived, concrete encounters that happen every day at this project, and no doubt in similar ones up and down the country. It is based on the simple fact that these young people, and these Christian youth workers, have decided to create home, and be at home, together. Creating home with young people is therefore not a new vision for the Church’s work with young people; it is already being practised, road-­ tested, and realised in this particular drop-in. Yet this book has sought to capture and analyse what happens here and to provide articulation to what it might mean, so that others might learn from it and follow in its footsteps. It is a vision appropriate for those taking the lesser-trodden path of Christian work with young people beyond the four walls of the church and for those who find that the youth ministry paradigms they began their journey with no longer seem to fit. The book began by establishing why a theological vision for the Church’s work with young people might be needed at all. A short review of the literature revealed that a compelling case was needed for Christian youth work that moves beyond typical youth ministry, faith-focused settings, as the current aims and objectives rendered many such provisions ineffective. Without a bigger vision for what the Church’s work with young people could look like, and what it is aiming to do, provisions like the drop-in may become a thing of the past, something churches used to do but ultimately concluded were not worth funding. If faith transmission is the only rightful aim of all of the Church’s work with young people,

8  CONCLUSION: FINDING HOME 

147

then, undeniably, such provisions do not provide the return on investment that may be expected. The book therefore set out to explore how the staff and young people at a particular Christian youth work project—the Youth Hub—articulated why it was meaningful and important to them. What emerged was an understanding of the project as a home for all who were part of it, and ultimately a case for why creating home with young people is theologically charged Christian action. Not only is creating home with young people significant in theological perspective, but it also may be more important than ever before. Numerous sociological, geographical, political, environmental, and technological factors are compromising our ability to find home in the world today. These factors may not be new in and of themselves, but combined create a perfect storm of elements that alienate, separate, and dispossess us as human beings in the world and make our contemporary way of being and becoming at home fragile. Although capturing the reality at the drop-in will speak into other cultures, contexts, and time periods by way of contrast and comparison, it is also therefore very much of its time and place; creating home with young people may be needed now, in the UK, in a way that it has not ever been before and may not be again in the future. As a work of practical theology, the book began with what is the case at the Youth Hub drop-in. The empirical research conducted was a piece of ethnography, seeking to capture the unique culture and practices of this particular community in order to reflect on why young people attend the Youth Hub. Ethnography entails an openness to the research process and to whatever it is that you, as a researcher, might discover. What I found early on in my fieldwork at the drop-in—through informal conversations, participant observation, archive research, and interviews with staff and young people—was that they described the drop-in as a home. There appeared to be five ways in which this was created and sustained at the drop-in: through the physical space which was set up to reflect a home; through the language of home and family used by the young people and leaders; through caring and nurturing relationships which took on a familial quality; through practices like eating together, celebrating birthdays, and going on holiday; and through the emotional environment which created the feeling of being at home. These five aspects are offered here with caution. The thinking on home presented in this book is not intended to provide a ‘model’ for the Church’s work with young people, a blueprint for youth work going forwards that ‘works’. Rather, it seeks to faithfully represent the reality

148 

P. HILL

created at a particular Christian provision and consider why it might be theologically important. There may be numerous ways to create home with young people and employ the theological vision articulated here without replicating the drop-in or creating a home space in the way that the drop-in is. And, as Jonas’s story made clear, home is a complex reality, a reality that may not always be positive. Homes can be oppressive and can be spaces that diminish their inhabitants rather than enable them to flourish. The danger of translating this vision into a model is that creating home becomes an end in itself. This is why the idea of homecoming— introduced by Heidegger as the interaction between journey and home, movement and dwelling—is perhaps a more helpful notion to take forwards than home as a static concept; a true experience of home must always include adventure and an encounter with the beyond. More than this, the book offers a theological vision built around the framework of home, not the theological vision for the Church’s work with young people, and seeks more generally to expand our understanding of what it is that we are aiming to do in Christian youth work. Although the framework of home has resisted becoming both an end in itself and a means to some other end—as if home were offered to young people for the sole end of transmitting Christian faith—the way in which faith was practised and nurtured at the drop-in was significant. Through the stories of Shahid, Michael, and Jonas, it was evident that the Youth Hub is a place where awareness of the Christian faith is raised and where conversations and Christian practices are the norm. This did not always lead to the outcome of a young person converting to Christianity, and neither should that be expected; Shahid, a young Muslim at the drop-in, arrived as a member of another religion and left as such. And yet the way in which faith was practised and talked about in full view of the young people created a particular climate and culture—one in which thinking about faith was not only allowed, but actively encouraged. In a broader sense at the drop-in, there was a diversity of engagements and levels of participation with the faith dimension of the provision. It tended to be the core young people who attended the drop-in nearly every day—and who described it as a home and family—who went on a journey of faith during their teenage years. Many other young people attended the drop-in only infrequently, but were still able to witness and participate in the Christian habitus, which included practices like praying before meal times. Placing this reality into a theological dimension, I suggested that participation in this Christian habitus was relatable to Bonhoeffer’s notion

8  CONCLUSION: FINDING HOME 

149

of the lebensraum, the living space of the church community. It is in this living space, the everyday lives of the Christian youth workers, that the Church becomes visible to young people again. Having explored what was the case at this particular drop-in and analysing why it may be significant, the theological discussion then moved into a normative dimension, seeking to establish why the Church should look for ways to create home with young people. Although this study is highly contextual, the lessons learned and theological work are applicable to other contexts, and the intention was to offer a theological case for why provisions like the Youth Hub are important Christian activity in the world. The philosophical, theological, and empirical elements were brought to a climax through the interaction between Heidegger’s unique understanding of boundary and place and Bonhoeffer’s notions of Christ as the boundary at the centre and the penultimate/ultimate. Through these elements a pathway between a radical and compromise approach to Christian youth work was carved, preventing its collapse into the extremes of either social action or evangelism. Bonhoeffer’s penultimate and ultimate distinction forged a way for home to be neither an end in itself nor a means to some other greater end, but rather a penultimate act. Creating home with young people is therefore a theologically charged act, one that is not only valid and important when faith transmission happens as a consequence. It is also not a good in and of itself, as a home that does not point beyond itself can become stifling and fail in what it seeks to do. Rather, creating home with young people can be penultimate action, when it is action that prepares the way for the coming of grace in their lives. It is action that takes seriously both the concrete human other who stands before us in the young person—their context and life experience to date—and the desire to share faith with them. The final question asked was what this home might look like in practice, and how the Church might offer hospitality to young people in a way that is genuinely mutual and enables them to be at home. Through Derrida’s discussion of the guest and host relationship, the way in which all hospitality can ultimately disempower the guest who arrives was highlighted. This emphasised the urgent need to intentionally tip power in the favour of young people through the Church’s interaction with them. The real difference between an invited guest and a stranger who arrives unannounced was acknowledged and translated into the terms of the drop-in; open access provisions like the drop-in, where young people can show up when they like and leave when they like, appear to facilitate a different and less

150 

P. HILL

conditional form of welcome. This raised a challenge about the way in which Christian work with young people is perceived, and the question of why the nature of welcome offered to young people often comes with certain conditions. These conditions reveal underlying institutional motives, a host mentality, and a perception that it is the Church who is a blessing and ushers in the arrival of God in a young person’s life—whereas the exact opposite may be true. The Church needs to develop a conviction of the importance of being with young people on their terms, however they choose to respond to this welcome.

The Benefits of Home as a Theological Framework The research contained in this book is an example of grounded theory, or perhaps grounded theology, as the home framework emerged organically from the drop-in environment. On reflection, there are several reasons why home offers a robust and helpful theological vision for the Church’s work with young people, side-stepping some of the challenges presented by other frameworks for youth work and theological thinking: • Home emphasises environment over outcomes. The current climate of the youth work field more generally, most notably the financial cuts and closures to services, has placed pressure on organisations to prove to funders why provisions are effective. There has been an increasing focus on outcomes-based measurement in youth work, which ultimately shapes and restricts the forms of youth work offered; there has been a shift towards more targeted projects in recent years. A parallel move can be seen in the Church’s work with young people; as numbers of young people attending church continue to decline and the youth ministry sector shrinks, the Church may only invest in work where the ‘outcome’ of conversion is present. This ultimately shapes and restricts the forms of Christian youth work possible and renders open access provisions like the drop-in too costly and ineffective. Creating home may well be a frustratingly slow and unstructured activity, with no guaranteed outcomes. And yet good homes create the right conditions in which people can flourish and become who they are without manipulation or coercion. The importance of this was highlighted through Heidegger’s discussion of technology and the way in which young people themselves, unless we are careful, might be turned into ‘standing reserve’—resources for the Church’s

8  CONCLUSION: FINDING HOME 

151

manipulation and use—through the way in which we engage with them. This process is dehumanising and ultimately may increase their experience of homelessness. In the case of a home, the environment itself really is the outcome: the fostering of a restorative environment in which people are nurtured. As I look back on my time as a volunteer Christian youth worker, and the various young people I have known over the years, it is all too easy to succumb to the ‘success’ narrative around outcomes. I think of the young people who have walked away from their faith, and wonder if I failed them, or failed in my task as a youth minister. I question whether I took the right approach, or whether the efforts made were worth it. But it is possible, to draw on Miriam’s metaphor, that seeds have been planted in these young people’s lives that may bear fruit in the long term. Even if the desired outcome has not emerged—namely, a young person becoming a Christian—the youth group may have created a certain kind of environment, one where the young people experienced healing, experienced safety and experienced family while many other aspects of their lives fell apart. We cannot control the outcomes of our work, but we can seek to create the conditions in which young people, and their faith, can flourish. What is the environment of your youth group like?

• Home incorporates both people and place. Historically, relationships have been central in youth ministry. Relational models of youth ministry have dominated, and the relational element has been the main characteristic of the Church’s work with young people. This is evident across secular youth work too, and there is a strong belief that good youth work sinks or swims on the strength of its relationships. This trend has been helpful and is not necessarily wrong. However, at times relationships have been elevated to such an extent that all other aspects of life—such as place—have been disregarded. In these instances, place is an optional extra, or merely the backdrop to the more important relational work happening in and through a project. Home incorporates both relationships and the physical space in which the relationships occur. The physical environment of the drop-in was significant, telling the story of what the project is about and the kinds of interactions expected within its four walls. When we think of home, we think of both the significant relationships we might have with family members and the concrete places in which those relationships are housed—the rooms where important events have happened; the furniture and objects that hold memories; and

152 

P. HILL

the sights, sounds, and smells of these special locations. A home framework for youth work takes seriously both of these crucial elements, redressing this potential imbalance in youth ministry thinking to date. Have you ever considered the ‘where’ of your youth group? Perhaps you are fortunate enough to have a designated space, or at least a consistent room in the church building or community centre where you meet. Even though we recently moved into a brand new building as a church, we have no space for our young people. We have been forced to gather in the entrance area of the church on Sunday mornings, fielding questions from latecomers, frequently disrupted by the arrival of small children who have escaped the crèche and always having to keep quiet so that we do not disturb the adults upstairs. It is far from ideal, and we have been exploring ways as a team to create a sense of place with our young people. How does the place in which you meet shape your group, and the sorts of relationships formed? How could you create a greater sense of place?

• Home makes sense of a holistic approach to Christian youth work. Another key characteristic of youth work, alongside relationships, is its holistic approach, responding to the interests of each individual young person and their unique practical, social, emotional, and spiritual needs. In Christian youth work, such a holistic approach may be categorised as ‘social action’, standing in contrast to the more important work of evangelism and discipleship; examples of such thinking were included in the introduction. The framework of a Christian home can help in providing an analogy for why these two elements must be held together. A Christian parent may ultimately wish their child to know Jesus for themselves and find their own faith. But it would be unthinkable for this parent to refuse to care for their child’s practical needs such as food and clothing, emotional support, love and care, homework help, play, the learning of skills, and so on, simply because this was their hope or intention overall. Indeed, they would not be considered fit to parent if they failed in these basic activities. A home includes all of these elements—whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. A home framework for youth work therefore also includes all of these elements. More than this, just as a child can, ideally, benefit from the loving nurture of a Christian parent whether or not they ultimately choose to become a Christian, so too can young people benefit from the positive home environment

8  CONCLUSION: FINDING HOME 

153

of the drop-in, whether or not they choose to follow in the faith of its leaders. It can still play an important role in their lives and can introduce them to the Christian faith through everyday practices, prayers, and conversations, even if they ultimately decide that it is not for them. One of the complications for Christian youth work when it comes to a holistic approach is the often distinct and separate nature of projects. The ‘social action’ projects—such as mentoring in schools or self-harm groups—tend to exist in a separate location from the discipleship-focused youth ministry groups. The same leader may run both, and may invite young people from one to the other, but they are ultimately different groups with a network of different relationships. Provisions like the Youth Hub offer something quite unique and important in contrast to this, given that they incorporate both the social action and discipleship elements into one space, with one group of young people and adults. This facilitates a genuinely holistic approach, embracing both the needs of the young people as they present themselves and also their faith development. Does your youth work involve a range of different groups and settings? How could you seek to integrate these, and create a holistic space which incorporates both of these elements?

• Home involves a family approach to ministry. One of the practical challenges of the Church’s approach to youth work is often an over-dependence on a particular leader. Not only is the youth leader—particularly if they are employed—expected to oversee all elements of a young person’s faith development, but there are also real challenges for a church if this leader moves on, as the relationships built carefully over time disappear. The drop-in has a unique structure, consisting of a web of relationships. Each young person who attends will get to know several different leaders and volunteers, meaning that if an individual leader leaves, there are consistent relationships to carry the young person forwards. Described as an ‘extended family’ by Michael, the drop-in therefore enables young people to be held by a wider web of relationships when compared with projects dependent on just one worker. The Church is ideally set up for this family approach to youth work, with a pre-existing network of multi-generational relationships. The challenge, though, is to find a way to bring the Church’s work with young people in-­ house, rather than creating siloed ministries existing at the edges. A family network of relationships also creates a place for peer

154 

P. HILL

r­elationships between young people, a reality that is often absent from youth ministry discourse (other than in a negative sense). At the drop-in, the young people described each other as like ‘siblings’ and these relationships were an important dynamic in the community. In many ways, the youth group model that emerged as a response to declining numbers of young people in churches has become a rod for its own back. Although it provides an important space for young people to be away from their parents and to hang out with others their age, it has also served to separate young people from the body of the Church, creating the problem of overdependence on a particular leader. It is hard to find our way back from this, holding on to all that is good about youth groups while also overcoming their challenges. This is particularly true of larger churches. Belonging to a smaller church, I often ponder how we are forced to be more intergenerational, as we do not have the resources to maintain multiple different age-appropriate groups. This can be a frustration, but is also an opportunity, and means that the young people in our church have relationships with a wider cross-section of members. What are the particular challenges in your setting? How could you facilitate a greater number of relationships between your young people and the wider church community?

• Home as a penultimate reality prevents oppositional theological thinking. The danger surrounding theological discussion of home is that a competitive relationship between earthly homes and the heavenly home is established. Conversation then turns to whether or not Christians have made themselves too much at home on the Earth, forgetting their heavenly citizenship and becoming too comfortable and enculturated to the environment around them. At the other end of the spectrum, a focus on the heavenly home can lead to a form of escapism, a disregarding of earthly life in its entirety and a forgoing of responsibility to care for the Earth, for others, or for our earthly bodies. Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the compromise and radical perspectives captured these two sides of the debate, the two opposing poles through which he sought to pave a middle way. Conceiving of home as a penultimate reality prevents collapsing into either end of the spectrum and oppositional or competitive thinking between these two realities; neither the ultimate nor the penultimate home can be prioritised at the expense of the other, as they are intimately connected. It is not the case that all versions of home on Earth will point to the heavenly home, preparing the way for grace to come, as there is not a causal relationship between these two realities. There

8  CONCLUSION: FINDING HOME 

155

must be intentionality for this to be the case and a willingness for the earthly home created to point beyond itself. What Bonhoeffer shows us is that these two realities are neither the same nor contrastive, but can work together. I grew up in a Christian home, and going to church was always a part of my life. My parents both had their challenges when it came to faith, and for many years felt that they were just about clinging on to God by the coat tails. And yet, through small, consistent actions, I came to know that faith was important to my parents. We would always pray before mealtimes. We would always go to church on a Sunday as a family. My mum would always go upstairs after dinner to spend some time in prayer. These small, faithful acts, repeated daily over many years, leave an indelible mark on you as a child. I believe that these actions, alongside being involved with a youth group at my church, prepared the way for grace to come in my life. They carved out a pathway through which Jesus could walk. And in the same way, in our homes, youth groups and churches, we might be able to prepare the way for grace to come. What small faithful acts make up your home life, or youth group? How might these prepare the way for Jesus to come in your child or young person’s life?

• Home navigates between boundaries and welcome. Homes are places of boundary—boundaries that demarcate the edges of a property, boundaries that determine how to behave inside of them—but are also places that hold unconditional welcome as an ideal. The well-known Parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s Gospel is an example of this loving and unconditional welcome of the son returning home, with no questions asked, no expense spared, and no conditions placed on the welcome. A truly unconditional welcome may be an impossibility. However, this does not mean that the impossible ideal is not helpful in pushing us towards a less conditional welcome in each case. And, a desire to offer a less conditional welcome does not mean that the home is without boundaries; Bonhoeffer’s notion of Christ as the boundary at the centre revealed that some boundaries are freeing and life-giving, while others are dehumanising. Home holds both boundary and welcome together, something Christian youth workers also have to negotiate in their work with young people. The answer is not always clear-cut or simple as far as welcoming or banning young people is concerned, but the vision of home may help in navigating this tension.

156 

P. HILL

I remember sitting down with a youth work volunteer who had recently been forced to close their Friday night youth group. The young people had been running riot, and the cohort of volunteers in charge of the evenings felt that it had become unmanageable, and unsafe. She looked pained as she recounted the story, as everything within her wanted to carry on and keep going. It is never easy to call time on projects. As youth workers, our desperate desire is to continue to love the most difficult young people, and make the sacrifices where others have not. But in this case, closing may have been the best option. Where the culture and boundaries of the space have not been established, or where they are not being respected by the young people, it is not a space where the humanity of the young people or adults is upheld. The delicate dance between boundary and welcome can feel an impossible one at times, but it is essential in order to create not only a home but a good home for young people, and a place that is humanising for all members of the community: both the young people and the youth workers. How does the challenge of boundary and welcome play out in your provision? Is your youth group a humanising place?

Bringing It Home The only remaining question to ask is, where do we go from here? We must begin by capturing a broader vision for what the Church’s work with young people could look like. We need to seek theological grounding for this vision, lest it be motivated by fear, numbers, or institutional motives. We must resist the dominant drive towards outcomes-based thinking in youth work, and the way in which this ultimately restricts the forms of provisions we offer young people. When things are not working, and young people are leaving, our tendency may be to tighten our grip, tighten our pockets, and return to the ways we have always done it. It may be counterintuitive, but to find new ways of being with young people we must do the exact opposite—opening up our hands, opening up our doors, opening up our lives. Home could provide one answer. Becoming at home is a problem for this generation in a way that it has never been before. We must forge new paths and seek ways to enable young people to find home with us. We must create homes that point beyond themselves, preparing the way for young people to encounter grace, and become at home with God. This could be in youth club-style settings or it could be elsewhere, through schools’ work, mentoring, or detached work. Many of the principles and

8  CONCLUSION: FINDING HOME 

157

thinking here apply more broadly, and the Church is ideally placed for this mission, if it could grasp it and believe in it. Finally, we must welcome young people on their terms. For too long we have defined how young people must act in order to be welcomed. If they have not behaved as we expect or would ideally like, we have chosen to cease trying or cease offering any provision for them. The challenge for us is to let go of our host mentality, redistributing the power in our relationship with young people and moving towards a less conditional form of welcome. We must enable young people to disrupt us, to arrive unannounced, and to be the blessing of God to us. We must find ways to welcome young people not only for their good, but for the good of the Church.

CHAPTER 9

Postscript: Beyond Youth Work

I have had several homes along the way. Born in North London, I spent my early years in a small house on Napier Terrace in Islington. It was a like a chocolate box, with pokey rooms piled on top of each other. But to me, as a toddler, it felt capacious. Like many families, we were forced out of London by the rising cost of living. My mum recalls not being able to buy a coffee in a café, as those two or three pounds might have made all the difference that month. We had a lodger living with us in the early years; I did not know any different. It is hard to tell whether the few memories I have of this house are really just photographs I have seen and pieced together in my mind. When I was five we moved to Norwich in the East of England, to a house close to the city centre. The house itself is lower than street level, hunkered down like a bunker, accessible by steps either side. We arrived to find the pond full of wine bottles and with each room wall-papered in a different shade of garish floral print. Although the fabric of the house evolved to be unrecognisable over the years—due to my architect father—I felt consistently at home. As I look at young people’s lives today—plagued by the pandemic, riddled by social media, and weighed down by exam pressure—my childhood and teenage years stand in stark contrast. They were peaceful times of friendship and of a simple, uninterrupted life. My main concerns were whether or not I was invited to Carly’s party and if Olly Jordan fancied me or my friend Jess. What a privilege that all now seems. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4_9

159

160 

P. HILL

The place I now call home with my young family is the Isle of Dogs. The Isle of Dogs is a funny place to find a home, often described unaffectionately as the ‘back end’ of London. It is the patch of land that sits inside the river loop on the Eastenders’ map, a cul-de-sac lingering between the dizzy heights of Canary Wharf’s financial metropolis and the grandeur of Greenwich. There are several dubious theories about how it got its name; the most popular is that King Henry VIII’s hounds resided here. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it or anything a visitor would go out of their way to see. Every part of the island is surrounded by water but no, you do not have to catch a boat to get to it (as I often get asked). Encased by the river Thames, the island is full to the brim of docks, former ship loading bays, and paraphernalia from its trading past. Mudchute Farm stands proudly in its middle, the largest of its kind in London. It is bizarre to stand on top of a grassy knoll, surrounded by sheep and woodlands, all the while dwarfed by the high-rise buildings of Canary Wharf which loom behind. Even the island, where I have felt a strong sense of belonging and place for the last ten years, has started to become distant. It is an odd and unsettling experience to find yourself no longer at home in a place you once called home. The streets, buildings, and parks which felt so familiar and inviting no longer call out to you in the same way. The web of relationships that held you to a location have moved on, and the sense of self you found in them is no longer secure. In some ways, home itself has moved, as being nearer to wider family beckons or a larger house becomes preferable. To lose our sense of home is disorienting, and intimately connected to who we are. In our globalised world and age of mass movement, home must be continually recreated and discovered. We are now searching once again for home. We are searching for the place that resonates with our internal song and roots us firmly in the ground once more. At the end of the conclusion, I hinted at the wider applications of the thinking presented in this book. This short postscript is a chance to unpack some of the ways in which the home framework could apply in broader youth contexts and also beyond youth work. It is an opportunity to explore together where this thinking could go, if we would wish to take it there. I made the bold claim early on that finding home may be the spiritual quest of the twenty-first century. Although becoming at home has always been an important project for humanity, at least in Heidegger’s eyes, there is a particular urgency in our time to finding home and a particular fragility to the homes we create. A safe and secure home, a place of

9  POSTSCRIPT: BEYOND YOUTH WORK 

161

belonging and peace, is no longer a given and can be easily undone. Young people may be at the forefront of this change and feel its effects more acutely, but all of us are caught up in it. This gives us pause to consider: in what ways might this be true for us? My experiences of home have been overwhelmingly positive, which is a privileged position to be in. Yet I am confident that what I feel about home is not unique to me, but rather something unique to the human condition. I am also convinced that finding home is more than just a material, financial, instinctual, or practical pursuit. Home calls to us on multiple levels and on a deeper, spiritual plane. The Church across the world has already begun to sense the potential of offering home to others and is already using the language of home to articulate its vision.1 There is something intuitive here, something that resonates both practically and in response to the needs of those around us, and also on a theological level. It taps into the reality that as human beings we are looking for home and looking for belonging, perhaps now more than ever. Home is therefore not only a theological vision for our work with young people, but captures something of what it means to be Church at this point in history. To get more practical, however, I shall explore four different ways in which the thinking offered here may resonate in other settings: in broader youth contexts, in Christian parenting of all forms, in work with the homeless, and in work with migrants and refugees.

Broader Youth Contexts Home as a theological vision emerged from the lived experiences of the young people and youth workers at the Youth Hub. The nature of youth work at the drop-in lends itself to becoming a home environment, given the combination of the relational dynamic and the physical setting. However, this is not to say that other forms of youth work could not also capture something of this vision in ways appropriate to the context. In Chap. 3 I outlined the five different aspects of home, as they emerged at the drop-in: the physical space, the language, the practices, the relationships, and the experience. Even if not all of these are replicable in

1  A prominent example of this is International Church Hillsong, who use the language of ‘Welcome Home’ on their branding and vision (see Hillsong Church. https://hillsong.com. Accessed 5 May 2021).

162 

P. HILL

other settings, it is possible that some may translate into other forms of youth work. Mentoring, for example, is heavily focused on the relationship between youth worker and young person. Mentoring often takes place in a school environment or perhaps in a context like a café, therefore making the physical setting less central. It may involve certain rituals or practices, such as a regular time slot, activities, or a questionnaire at the start, but may also be flexible and informal. The mentor is less likely to talk about their relationship in familial terms or use the language of home in their interactions with young people. However, the relationship will inevitably reflect many of the aspects of holistic nurture identified at the drop-in, and the mentor will no doubt seek to enable the young person to feel safe, welcome, and at home with them. Beyond these five aspects, the focus of the conversation may tend towards a young person’s home life. At the Youth Hub, this was certainly the case. Young people were often referred for mentoring due to challenges going on at home, which was impacting their behaviour at school. In this sense, the vision of wanting to enable young people to become more fully at home—this time in their familial home environment rather than in an additional ‘second home’ space—may well be appropriate. It is also interesting to ponder here if youth work provisions could offer wrap-around home experiences. Aaminah was 13 when she first came into contact with the Youth Hub, through a self-harm project run at her school. She started attending the drop-in regularly after the short-term project finished. Aaminah was in care. She lived with foster parents until the age of 16 when she moved into her own accommodation—a one-bed flat. She continued to attend the drop-in up to the age of 18 when, with support from drop-in staff, she secured a place at university and went away to study. From the ages of 16–18, Aaminah had a home in terms of her own space to be; she had a physical home space. However, simply having somewhere to live does not necessarily mean that she experienced other aspects of home: nurturing relationships, the feeling of safety, and so on. She was not home-less, but also did not necessarily have homeliness or homefulness.2 It is very possible that for Aaminah, the drop-in could have provided some of the elements of home—relationships, rituals, ­experience—as an additional support to the physical environment she was 2  This is Brueggemann’s term, see Brueggemann, Walter. 2014. The Practice of Homefulness. Ed. K.C. Hanson. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books.

9  POSTSCRIPT: BEYOND YOUTH WORK 

163

living in. Perhaps it is in cases such as these that the drop-in can most powerfully offer a second home or a second source of home for the young people who choose to access it. And, in a similar way, mentoring does not necessarily have to offer every aspect of home in order to do something meaningful; building a nurturing relationship and creating a safe space for a young person like Aaminah in a mentoring setting may be just the wrap-­ around home support that she needs.

Christian Parenting, Fostering, and Adoption Throughout, I have sought to challenge the notion that home is the exclusive prerogative of family domains and expand our sense of how and where we can be at home. Despite this, there are many obvious ways in which the thinking and theology in this book resonates with familial home settings. The suggestion that building homes of all kinds is important Christian work can give confidence to Christian parents who want to prioritise their home lives, but feel conflicted by the need to prioritise God’s wider mission in the world. The same tension Christian youth workers may feel in their work with young people—the tension identified as the competitive relationship between the ultimate, sharing the gospel, and the penultimate, wanting young people’s good and flourishing now—is evident here in a different manifestation. Parents may feel guilty investing in their family home life, when there are many other important church activities, weekly groups, and missional agendas that compete for their time and attention. This may be particularly true for those in ministry, whose endless list of demands and commitments at unsociable weeknight and weekend hours present a direct challenge to time with family. And yet, giving children a safe and secure home is, as we have seen, an essential foundation to their very humanity and may well pave the way for the coming of grace in their lives. In a time when many Christian parents feel disempowered or unsure of their role in the faith formation of their children,3 or perhaps have outsourced this responsibility to the Church, we must recapture a vision of how our homes can enable children and young people to find home with God.

3   Mark, Olwyn. 2016. Passing on Faith. https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/ research/2016/10/31/passing-on-faith. Accessed 9 August 2021.

164 

P. HILL

Christians can play an important role in creating home with children and young people outside of their biological family. As Chap. 2 highlighted, the numbers of children going into care in the UK continue to rise, particularly in the older teenage groups. Organisations like Home for Good have sought to rally the Church around this issue, raising awareness of the significant role Christians can play in meeting the needs of young people in care and providing temporary or forever homes for them.4 There are ways in which the thinking of this book applies even more neatly to a fostering and adoption context than to a youth club context. The Youth Hub is ultimately limited in the home that it can offer to young people. Although the young people describe it as a home and feel at home within the Youth Hub walls, the drop-in is only open for a few hours each day after school. It may be a home, but it is a limited kind of home. There are also professional boundaries to the relationships with the youth workers, who seek to facilitate family type bonds with the young people but ultimately are unavailable to them beyond the confines of the drop-in hours. Although relationships may continue through other events or church activities beyond 18, the home at the drop-in is offered for a distinct time only: the teenage years. In these ways, fostering and adoption facilitate a deeper kind of home experience for children and young people than a youth club. In the case of fostering, the home offered remains a second home or additional source of home and safe space for as long as is needed, as a youth club may be. Despite not necessarily being permanent, a foster home offers a young person a less limited home space than the drop-in can provide. With adoption, the new home becomes the main, significant home influence in a child’s life. In both of these cases, however, the mission and calling remains the same: to create home with children and young people in such a way that paves the way for the coming of grace. The five elements evident at the drop-in that made up the home reality are also present in familial home settings: the physical house, the language of home and family, the relationships, the rituals, and the experience. Saying this, the extent to which these are put into practice and nurtured in a fostering and adoption environment will affect whether or not a young person truly feels at home at home. The difference here, and where a youth club may offer something that a fostering or adoption placement cannot, is over the nature of choice. A 4

 Home for Good. https://www.homeforgood.org.uk/. Accessed 9 August 2021.

9  POSTSCRIPT: BEYOND YOUTH WORK 

165

child or young person may not have a choice about where they are placed once in care; they are the responsibility of the state, or of their legal guardians, and may have limited say in where their future lies. The Youth Hub, however, is a chosen home and family. It is a home that is available to any young person who would wish to be part of it and one they can opt into or out of. It is a home based on voluntary participation and the freedom to choose it may be particularly significant for young people who have had choices taken away from them in other areas of their lives.

Work with the Homeless Throughout history, the Church has always lived alongside and served the homeless and those without physical shelter. Unlike youth work, therefore, which in its current form is a relative newcomer, the Church has always grasped the importance and the theological significance of providing shelter to those in need. There is perhaps less of an urgency for a theological case for working with the homeless, as it would seem to be a deeply ingrained practice that has been passed down through time. However, there are still applications to be made of the thinking offered in this book and a challenge for the way in which we might come alongside those in need. The first and perhaps most important thing to say is that simply having a physical house does not mean that you are at home. On the flip side, simply being without a physical house does not mean that you are home-­ less. It is very possible that the person sitting in a doorway on your local high street experiences more homeliness than a high-flying financial expert, who returns to their house each night but does not feel at home in their space. We must not assume, therefore, that street dwellers are actually home-less. We must not approach such individuals with a deficit mindset, adopting the powerful position of the home-bringer to the one who is in need. Maybe they can teach us what it is to truly be at home, without the need for a physical house. Besides, the doorway they sleep in is a consistent place and may bring the same familiarity, regularity, and peace that others of us commonly associate with a structured dwelling. Many individuals who live on the streets do not actually wish to live in a house and have got used to this way of living. The same challenge can be levelled at how we approach young people, particularly young people who may have more obvious challenges at home or have had to leave their familial home

166 

P. HILL

for whatever reason; we all need to become at home and they may have as much to teach us about finding home as we have to teach them. Work with the homeless may already be widespread in the worldwide Church, but can also be prone to the means to end thinking highlighted in relation to youth work. In my anecdotal experience, although there is more of a sense of the inherent importance of offering shelter to the homeless than there is, say, of youth work, churches may still seek ways to evangelise those accessing their services. I have witnessed evenings at a night shelter, run by a church, where the guests are encouraged to be part of a Bible study or Alpha course. This is not necessarily wrong and may be entirely appropriate in the context. But the same danger is present here as with Christian youth work that seeks to share faith with young people: the homeless project can subtly, without due thought, become a means to another end—namely, the ‘true’ end and objective of converting individuals to Christianity. This betrays both a lack of integration between the practices of social action and evangelism, and a lack of theological conviction about the way in which God is at work through the act of opening up one’s home to another. To be clear here, it may be entirely appropriate to share faith in this context. However, we must always be aware of the implicit power dynamic of the relationship between a church and those in vulnerable groups, and resist the potential slip into means to end thinking as a justification for our work. The pathway between the two extremes of the penultimate and ultimate, suggested by Bonhoeffer, goes beyond offering a helpful way of integrating the different aspects of the work we do as Christians. Bonhoeffer also places responsibility on the part of the Christian, as failing to act makes them ethically culpable. In the passage quoted in chapter 6 from Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes: ‘If the hungry do not come to faith, the guilt falls on those who denied them bread. … To bring bread to the hungry is preparing the way for the coming of grace.’ If the hungry do not come to faith, it is the Christian’s fault for failing to feed them or offer them shelter. There is also an intimate connection in Bonhoeffer’s account between the sharing of bread or the offering of shelter and the coming of grace. It is this act that prepares the way for the coming of grace in their lives, not another supplementary act such as doing a Bible study. Here the role of the Christian and the role of Christ in the equation come into focus; for Bonhoeffer, the key aspect is an individual encountering grace, encountering Jesus for themselves. As Christians, our actions, like offering shelter to the homeless, can become penultimate action if they smooth the

9  POSTSCRIPT: BEYOND YOUTH WORK 

167

way for Jesus to step into an individual’s life. We do not offer shelter so that we might do something else, like run an alpha course. We offer shelter so that a space may be opened up for Christ to intervene and to meet with them.

Work with Migrants and Refugees We are living in a time of mass movement and displacement across the globe. As highlighted in Chap. 2, the figures and statistics in this area are staggering, and more people than ever find themselves forced to leave their homes and homelands. Into this context, the way in which we offer hospitality to the other and the foreigner in our midst becomes of crucial significance. Our posture towards those who are unlike us, and who may not belong, is an important part of our Christian witness in the globalised world we live in. In our perception of and posture towards young people, I have suggested that a shift is needed. The notion of ‘being Jesus’ to young people indicates a particular power dynamic, with the Christian youth worker being the sole bestower of a blessing on the fortunate young person whom they encounter. We must challenge this implicit dynamic in our thinking and practice when it comes to working with young people, recognising, in tune with the biblical precedent, that the young stranger who arrives unannounced may be the arrival of God in potentia. This thinking resonates with the broader conversation around hospitality and how we welcome the other, the stranger, or the foreigner who does not belong. Such an approach confers dignity onto those we seek to welcome, recognising that they may bless us as much if not more than we can bless them. We welcome and make a home for the other not only because we are called to do so, but because in doing so we may encounter God himself. This shift in perspective is strengthened by Bonhoeffer’s notion that as Christians we are rightfully restored to being guests and foreigners on the Earth through Christ. In the blueprint of life established in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were the guests of God, not needing to own or possess the land but receiving it as gift; it is this reality that Christ the rediscovered boundary opens up once again. To call the other a ‘foreigner’ is subtly to suggest that we belong and that the other does not. Yes, we may enjoy rights and privileges of being born in a particular place, but as Christians we must recognise that our identity is to be non-belongers who have found their place in Christ. Like those who arrive as migrants and

168 

P. HILL

refugees to the country, we are rightfully those who do not belong. How different our perspective and posture towards the other might be if we grasped this fully. The final application is the challenge of whether or not we are willing to be disrupted by those who arrive unannounced. Just as the drop-in creates a dynamic where young people are able to arrive on their terms, meaning that the youth workers must be prepared to be unprepared to encounter them, so too must we seek out ways to enable those who are dispossessed to arrive on their terms. A stark example of this is the small boats of people arriving in the UK from across the shore in France, often mercilessly turned away by authorities or detained in centres. We are not willing as a country to welcome those who arrive unannounced or who are not specifically invited by us. The question is whether, as a Church, and as individuals, we will be different. In the story told by Jesus of the Good Samaritan, the man stumbles across someone in need of his help while out on his daily walk. This person is different to him, a foreigner and an enemy. The religious people walk on past, unwilling to be disrupted and unprepared to interrupt their day to help him. But the Samaritan stops, changing the course of his journey and taking the man to a nearby inn for shelter. The question for all of us is: are we willing to be disrupted by those who arrive unannounced in our lives and prepared to be unprepared to welcome them however they may show up?

References Brueggemann, Walter. 2014. The Practice of Homefulness. Ed. K.C.  Hanson. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Hillsong Church. https://hillsong.com. Accessed 5 May 2021. Home for Good. https://www.homeforgood.org.uk/. Accessed 9 August 2021. Mark, Olwyn. 2016. Passing on Faith. https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/ research/2016/10/31/passing-­on-­faith. Accessed 9 August 2021.

Appendix

Ethical Approval Ethical approval was granted for my ethnographic research study by King’s College London. My research proposal was initially approved on the basis of an opt-in written consent process for the young people and youth leaders. After several months in the field I applied for an amendment to my research proposal which, based on the challenge of the written consent process, would allow me to carry out an oral opt-in consent process for the young people at the drop-in; this amendment was approved. For each of the different phases, parental consent was sought for those under 16. However, the manner of this consent differed between the observation and interview aspects of the research. For the observation stage of the research, parents of under-16s were given the opportunity to opt-out. No interviews were carried out with young people under 16, but if they had been, I would have secured opt-in written parental consent in these cases.

Research Participants My research involved 58 participants in total. Of these participants, 27 were Youth Hub staff members (20 female and 7 male), 7 were volunteer youth leaders (4 female and 3 male), and 24 were young people (10 female and 14 male). The participants are listed in the table below. The majority of participants were recruited from the drop-in, with the exception of one © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4

169

170 

APPENDIX

cohort from a short-term project. Although it may be usual to provide a list of participants with character descriptions, including demographics such as gender and ethnicity, I have decided for the purposes of anonymity not to do so. Given that this book includes extended narrative extracts, meaning that individuals are described in detail, I was concerned that additional demographic data might compromise the anonymity of the individuals mentioned. It is important to note, however, that the young people who attended the drop-in came from a variety of backgrounds and represented a diverse group across ethnicity and religion. Although the Youth Hub does not collect data with regard to young people’s religious affiliation, I spoke with young people who were Muslim, Christian, and non-religious. What was particularly interesting was the diversity even within the religious groupings present. For example, Christian young people at the drop-in were not necessarily from evangelical backgrounds or denominations; some were Catholic, some Pentecostal, and a significant number were Seventh-day Adventist.

Analysing the Data There is no one formula for analysing ethnographic data and I therefore adopted two different approaches. Early on in the research process, ‘indigenous classification schemes’1 emerged in the field; the young people and leaders talked about the youth club as a home. However, as a novice researcher, I was not confident to rely solely on my hunch in this respect and wanted to carry out a rigorous process of coding in order to ensure that this was also reflected in the data. I carried out the first wave of data analysis in December 2017. To do this, I transcribed the interviews carried out to date, typed up my fieldnotes, and digitised the archive data. I imported these files into Nvivo software and coded the data into, initially, 207 general codes. The general codes which emerged from this process were wide-ranging and, at this stage, disorganised. I then began a process of reading through the codes, writing memos, and journaling. Through this process, the home theme emerged as the central unifying concept across the codes and they were grouped into sub-themes. This was the beginning of an iterative process of weaving back and forth between the theory and data, a key aspect in grounded 1

 Brewer, John. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press. 16.

 APPENDIX 

171

theory. The continuing fieldwork and second round of interviews with young people were re-focused around the home theme. This was not to test the theory in the manner of a hypothesis, but rather to interrogate how and in what ways the participants experienced (or did not experience) home. In the final wave of data analysis in August 2018, I moved into the ‘delimiting the theory’2 stage whereby insignificant codes and themes began to fade into the background. This resulted in a reorganisation of relevant categories into subcategories, gathered around and related to the central concept of home. Participant

Name

Age

Observation

Interview

Young person

Abraham Beth Bryony Carly Charlotte Jonas Michael Shahid Aaminah Aleksander George Isaiah Karl Kayla Lena Luke Milly Robbie Rose Shahana Steven Timmy Tom Tyrell

18 19 18 18 16 19 18 18 18 18 17 18 14 19 15 15 15 17 14 17 14 14 17 14

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X X

(continued)

2  Glaser, B. G., and A. L. Strauss. 2017. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. London and New York: Routledge. 255.

172 

APPENDIX

(continued) Participant

Name

Staff member

Bethany Beverley Claire Freya Grace Hannah James Lydia Miriam Sally Sarah Val Zoe Ben Berenice Florence Jane Janine John Keith Liz Louise Melissa Olivia Paul Peter Richard Elizabeth Josephine Lara Mark Olly Saskia Thomas

Volunteer

Age

Observation

Interview

X X X X X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

All names are pseudonyms

a

References Brewer, John. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press. Glaser, B.G., and A.L. Strauss. 2017. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. London and New York: Routledge.

Index1

A Adoption, 163–165 Ahmed, Sara, 70, 81 Anxiety, 7, 18, 56 Asylum seekers, 2, 9, 26 Atkins, Zohar, 79, 80, 85 Attachment, 68–75, 83, 84 B Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 3, 11–18, 12n21, 13n28, 13n29, 99–102, 108, 111–122, 111n6, 112n9, 114n13, 128, 132–135, 148, 149, 154, 155, 166, 167 boundary, 111–115, 128, 132, 133, 135, 136 Christ, 113–117, 120, 128, 133, 136, 149, 155; the boundary, 113–115, 128, 133, 149, 155 the Fall, 111, 112, 114 foreigner, 167

on home, 3, 12–14, 13n28, 13n29 lebensraum, 99, 100, 102, 149 penultimate/ultimate, 111–122, 149, 166 politics, 16, 100 radical/compromise, 118, 121, 149, 154 sicut deus, 112, 133 Bordieu, Pierre, 96, 97 Boundaries, 46, 50 at the drop-in, 50, 128, 132–136, 142, 143 home, 110–116, 128, 132–136, 138 place, 110, 111, 115, 116 C CAMHS, 10, 22 Children in care, 9, 26 Christian, 44, 47, 48

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. Hill, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer and the Concept of Home in Christian Youth Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96690-4

173

174 

INDEX

Christian youth work, 3–6, 8, 9, 89–96, 98, 102, 106–108, 117, 118, 121, 122, 127, 128, 135, 136, 140, 143, 146–150, 152, 153 Church, 2–9, 13–15, 17, 18, 28, 29, 32, 38, 39, 96, 98–102, 134, 136–138, 140–143, 141n23, 146–157, 161, 163–166, 168 Church of England, 32 Climate change, 29 Collins-Mayo, Sylvia, 5, 7, 91–95, 98, 102 Colonialism, 27, 28, 128 Conditional youth work, 3, 140 COVID-19 pandemic, 30 D de Botton, Alain, 32, 51, 52 Deficit, 47, 47n14, 165 Dehumanising, 64 Derrida, Jacques, 129, 130, 133, 134n13, 135, 137–140, 143, 149 guest/host dynamic, 130 Drop-in, 9–11, 22–25, 23n2, 27, 28, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46–61, 63, 64, 68, 70–85, 87–98, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 120, 122, 126–128, 132–143 See also Youth centre; Youth club E Embodied, 96, 99 Emmaus Road, 131 Ethical youth work, 3, 93 unethical, 3 Ethnography, 10, 46, 69, 70, 147

F Family, 67–71, 80–83, 147, 148, 151, 153, 155 breakdown, 25, 26 chosen family, 58, 165 complicated relationships, 22–24, 47 familial language, 46, 52, 53, 56, 64 negative influence, 71, 72, 84 parents, 26, 163 structure at the drop-in, 58, 153 Foreigner, 130, 134 Fostering, 163–165 Funding, 77–79, 84, 146 G Grounded theory, 11 H Habitus, 94–98, 102 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 11–17, 12n21, 28, 33–38, 46, 61–64, 73, 75–80, 82, 83, 85, 108–111, 114, 121, 148–150 being-in-the-world, 46, 62 boundaries, 110, 111, 114 the clearing, 108–110 Dasein, 34, 61, 62 dwelling, 62–64, 83, 85, 109, 121 essence, 63, 64 the fourfold, 37 on home, 3, 12, 13 home and the unhomely, 82–84 politics, 16 releasement, 108 safeguarding, 109 technology, 35–38, 75–79, 150; enframing, 36, 37, 77 Hirsch, Barton, 46, 47, 69–71, 76

 INDEX 

Holistic, 9, 56, 58, 106, 152, 153 Home, 21–40, 105–123 being at home, 2 boundaries, 155 at the drop-in; environment, 48–53, 64; experience, 47, 53, 59–61; language, 52–54; practices, 54–55, 64; relationships, 47, 53, 55–59, 64 feeling ‘at home,’ 22, 28, 33, 48, 59, 61, 64, 73, 81, 82 framework for youth work, 3, 150, 152 home and homelessness, 67–85 homecoming, 83, 85, 121, 148 place, 151, 155 Homelessness, 67–85, 151, 161, 165–167 alienation, 3 global factors; loss of earth as home, 29–30; loss of home, 25–27; loss of homeland, 27–28; loss of transcendent home, 30–33 the plight of our age, 13 unhomeliness, 68, 81, 82 work with the homeless, 161, 165–167 youth homelessness, 38 Hospitality, 3, 15, 18, 126–143, 149 Housing, 26 Humanising, 62–64, 136 See also Dehumanising I Indigenous classification scheme, 61 In potentia, 131, 143, 167 Institutional agenda, 8, 142 J Jennings, Willie James, 27, 28

175

L LGBTQ+, 58, 137 M Means to ends, 6, 55, 122, 166 Mentoring, 162, 163 Migration, 27, 161, 167–168 Muslim, 88, 89, 93 N Normativity, 108, 128, 137 O Open access youth work, 9, 72, 77, 78n11, 84, 127, 128, 135, 150 Outcomes, 3, 78, 79, 84, 132, 133, 141, 142, 148, 150, 151, 156 P Parachurch, 4, 9, 99 Performativity, 53, 79n12 Phenomenology, 34 Planting seeds, 107, 108, 121 Poetic, 79, 80, 82, 85 Power, 3, 71, 73, 78, 127–132, 135–140, 142, 143 Practical theology, 17, 18, 147 R Raising Christian consciousness, 7, 90–94 Refugees, 2, 9, 24, 26, 161, 167–168 Relationships, 22, 23 Religion, 2, 31, 32 decline narrative, 7, 31 Root, Andrew, 6n10, 16, 33, 135 Rumsey, Andrew, 131, 138

176 

INDEX

S Safety, 21, 24, 25, 58, 60, 63, 162 Second home, 47, 53, 162–164 Self-harm, 10, 56, 57, 59, 63, 162 Smith, James K. A., 95, 96 The stranger, 129–132, 138, 139, 149, 167 Sunday Schools, 4, 8 T Targeted youth work, 78, 127, 128, 150 Taylor, Charles, 30, 33 Technology, 2, 7, 35, 36, 38 cyberbullying, 77 digital technology, 76 technological approach to youth work, 7, 38, 84, 85 technological devices, 68, 75, 77, 84 Thick description, 47, 48n15 Third space, 9

Thompson, Naomi, 6, 8, 91 Tonstad, Linn, 136, 137, 139 Transcendence, 31–33, 38 Tweed, Thomas A., 31 U Unstructured youth work, 77, 126, 127 Urban, 28 Y Youth centre, 1, 2 Youth club, 1–7, 17, 18 Youth Hub, 1, 9–11, 17, 22–24, 23n2, 28, 39, 44, 48, 49, 51, 55–61, 64, 68–69, 72–75, 78, 80, 82–84, 88–95, 97–99, 102, 103, 105, 108, 120, 121, 123, 127, 132, 133, 138, 147–149, 153