What's going on around you? Better yet, what's not going on around you? Everybody needs help sometime, some way, but who around you needs specific help now? And don't forget that you also need help and get lots of it from many persons and you'll keep on needing help. This is a useful idea to remember as you think about being helpful to others.
A few possibilities to start you thinking:
- Children and youth who need friendly tutors
- Children who need play experience with youth
- Mothers who need short-term child care so they can get out
- Old persons who can't do for themselves
- Shut-ins who need all kinds of things
- Sick people
Or think of it this way: What useful things can your youth group do around the church building? At the Y? With scouts? Community centers? Hospitals? Homes? Do you have a volunteer bureau or a Voluntary Action Center in your community? Ask.
And then there are issue-oriented service activities: voter registration programs, pollution control activities, political campaigns (yep!), programs dealing with drugs, runaways, and so on. Community organization to empower the powerless is another way to serve.
Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty, the kind of service that really means something: dealing with issues, changing the system
That's where a lot of young people want to be. "I want service that is meaningful," said one young person. "I don't want bedpan duty." It's a challenge to try to change the system, and it needs changing, no doubt about that. It's understandable that many youth want to take the glory road of effecting social change rather than emptying bedpans. But, dear friend, what kind of new system can be created by persons who lack the human compassion and humility to empty bedpans?
Occasional service will occur when there is an unusual event. Something happens. A need is evident. You do something about it. After a flood or fire or accident or tragedy, you organize your group to clean up or gather food and clothing or provide child care or just be there or whatever else is needed.
Ongoing service settings are more likely in that for many people the needs go on and on. But in either ongoing or occasional service settings, make careful plans so that your group can provide adequate personnel for the service needed for the period of time designated. Don't complicate the lives of people by offering more than you can deliver. Make certain you have the skills and capabilities needed. This means careful assessment of proposed projects for junior highs and senior highs alike.
The possibilities for service are numerous. Here are a few general guidelines.
1. Start in Your Own Community
Hurt, loneliness, injustice, and oppression exist everywhere. It's much more glamorous, of course, to take a trip to some exotic place for a service project, but the cost of such service is usually far more than the service contribution made by a youth group in a short time. Not only is there the cost of preparation, transportation, rooms, meals, and supplies on your part, but the bigger cost in the time, energy, and dollars the host situation expends for preparation, supervision, and recovery. Often the already exploited people end up being further exploited so that a youth group can have a groovy service project away from home. It's a hard reality to face.
If your group wishes to visit mission projects and special programs, take a trip, learn all you can, enjoy it, but don't try to justify a trip by calling it service.
2. Take a Long Hard Look at Unmet Needs
Who has poor eyesight and might enjoy being read to? Who lives alone and would find a visit from a young friend most pleasant? Who is tied at home with young children and would appreciate baby-sitters a couple of hours during the day to get out for some uninterrupted shopping? Who has difficulty with chores and might appreciate a helping hand? One church member, after a lonely stay in the hospital, dedicated his free time to visiting sick persons in hospitals in his community. Young people manage the visitors' desk at one hospital.
Ecology groups are springing up. Programs to recycle paper and glass are found in many communities. Young people can help in these programs. And who is it that cleans up the town creek? In our town, the high school students!
Our town has a tutoring program in the public schools with five hundred tutors, many of whom are high school students. Young people at times are more effective than adults in tutoring situations.
An important issue is going to be discussed at the town council. Who will come? Will various viewpoints be heard? Young people inviting citizens to attend can help shape a decision. At one time some young people were interested in a particular issue. It was scheduled as the last item on the agenda of the town council. When seventy teenagers showed up, the agenda item became number one!
3. Plan Carefully
While many young persons find meaningful service as individuals, it is important to remember that a congregation is a body of persons acting corporately in worship and in service. So don't strike out on your own; make plans in your group to serve as a group insofar as this is possible.
- Determine a need in your community.
- What will service cost in terms of time, energy, dollars? Be reasonably certain you can deliver what you promise.
- Do you have the skills to do what is needed?
- Talk your plans through with the agency you are working with or with the persons to be served. Does everybody understand what is to be done? When? Where? Who? How?
One group of young people committed themselves to a tutoring program and then had to cancel because they didn't have dependable transportation to the school. Another group planned to build a small frame building on a long weekend --- and left a messy uncompleted job because their skills were not adequate for the time allowed and they kept getting in one another's way! A group from a suburban church planned a weekend project with youth of a city church to clean up a city lot for a playground. Planning included:
- Thinking how big the job was
- What tools were needed and how to get them
- The muscle power needed
- How they would get there and back
- What to do with the junk
- Where they would sleep
- Who would cook what, when, and where
- Who would buy and pay for food and other supplies
- Who would be the supervisor
- Recreation and worship
- How to do a similar thing when youth from the city church came to the suburban church for a weekend project
What are the differences between service activity for senior highs and junior highs? That depends a lot, of course, upon the particular group. But generally junior highs will need much more supervision, and their projects should not require developed skills. A ninth-grader can tutor a sixth-grader, but ninth-graders should not attempt tasks for which they have not yet acquired necessary skills. Junior highs will tend to find service opportunities with community agencies into whose programs they can fit. Senior highs can organize service projects of their own devising but can find meaningful service with organizations also.
4. Examine Your Motives
Young people should ask themselves: Why do you want to serve? To score brownie points? To get a star on your crown? To be one of the gang? To help people? To work out your own problems? To find fulfillment for yourself? Service is a tricky thing. Much of it is for selfish reasons. Not that all selfish reasons are bad, but there is nothing worse than somebody whose need to be needed is so great that other persons are exploited to satisfy the needs of the one who serves. If poverty were abolished, a lot of helping agencies and volunteers would be out of business. Sometimes it seems that needy people are kept needy so that those who need to be needed are needed.
So why serve?
"I want to do something meaningful. I'm fed up with school. My life is full of useless routines. I want to do something that counts." Multitudes of young people are saying these things. And meaning apparently isn't found in what most of us do most of the time.
It's tough to see meaning in what we ordinarily do, so we go looking for something else. And the farther removed from our routine the better. Okay, so you're human. But the trick is to discover meaning in what you are doing. Serving others may be just that thing. In a way this is selfish, but it is self-fulfillment and not self-aggrandizement.
When John set out to make a name for himself in school, he succeeded. He joined everything, volunteered for every project, didn't get anything completed, and his grades suffered. He didn't care for the name he made for himself! Sue didn't buck for anything. She did fewer things but did them well. She lost herself in her activities and in service to others. John campaigned vigorously for student council. Sue was elected.
Jesus put it on the line. He said that to be great, one must be the servant of all. Greatness is not to be number one. To know the full joy, happiness, meaning, and purpose of life is number one. Being a servant to all doesn't mean that you're a slave for anybody to push around; it means an attitude, practice, and lifestyle of voluntarily doing things for others.
Jesus put it on the line, not only in words but with his life. He has been called "the man for others." He was always doing something for somebody. He did something for all of us, and he did it voluntarily. Although executed as a criminal, Jesus did not have his life taken from him. He freely offered up his life for all people. That's what salvation is all about.
5. Anticipate Trouble
You would think that most people's attitudes about service are mature. You are going to run into problems. As long as you are engaged in "safe" service projects, most everybody will applaud your actions: caring for the sick, teaching children, reading to the blind, helping the elderly, working around the church, cleaning up---whatever are good things to do.
But when your actions are direct service or advocating social change in the arenas of race, poverty, drug culture, peace, gender issues, or anything else that frees, liberates, and empowers people, you will meet stiff opposition from folks who don't want to change. You'll hear things like:
"They are shiftless and lazy and are taking advantage of you."
"Charity begins at home; take care of your own first."
"Go slow. Don't rock the boat."
"That's too controversial."
"That's our work, and you keep out of our way. "
"That's a good thing you're doing, but is that really church work?"
When engaged in such service, careful planning for the program itself is essential, but more important is planning of a political nature to deal with parents, church officials, community leaders, and professional leaders in service agencies. Who is likely to be critical? About what? Why? How do you get potentially critical people in your planning? How do you get objectors involved?
6. Experiment
This is an opportunity to try out new roles, new relationships, new occupations. Does someone want to be a secretary? The office of many voluntary associations could use help in office routines. What about ecology as a career? Test it out by looking in your community for evidence of pollution and its sources. How about the medical profession? Many hospitals and clinics can use volunteers. Interested in social work? There are agencies nearby which would be glad to have volunteers. Maybe your group's thing is administration. Take on the administrative responsibilities for a service project. Service programs are ways to expand personal horizons. Perhaps your group doesn't come into contact with aged people. Maybe it's small children they might need to know. Perhaps persons of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds will come into your group's life to enrich it in an unusual way. Working with business and professional people also is a benefit of service. Persons who are different may come into your life. Learn from these new experiences.
7. Evaluate
This usually means "How did you like it?" and "Do you want to do it again?" Of course, personal feelings are important, but the central question is: To what extent did we achieve our objectives? Sometimes a negative evaluation does not indicate poor performance but too large an objective. One can hardly stress too much the importance of clarifying the objectives for a project.
Objectives include the specific service to be performed and the learnings you hope to gain from the event. The first can be stated concretely (130 hours of tutoring for ten persons during the next three months), but the second should be more open and anticipatory. While 130 hours of tutoring is a measurable objective, the quality of what goes into those hours is another matter. However you may feel about what takes place, the one being helped is the one to say if the event has been helpful or not.
Evaluation should include a review of learnings. Take some time and talk through your experiences and list the things you learned. You probably will be surprised.
8. Enjoy Yourself
The world is full of qualified experts. They mess things up too. Youth service activity does not assume professionalism or expertise. You have some skills. You have muscle. You have a brain. You have energy and enthusiasm. These are needed, and there is much to be done. Relax and do the best job you can. Don't expect to work miracles.
Along the way, plan (or have the sense to recognize) moments of celebration, especially with those with whom you work---those moments of rapturous joy when the Holy Spirit sweeps over a group or explodes within its midst. Name that moment and celebrate in singing, shouting, dancing, hugging, praying, crying, laughing, or whatever is the natural thing to do.
