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Photo: St Paul's Youth Forum
Photo: St Paul's Youth Forum

Making a Difference

Monday June 5 2017

Thomas Baldwin investigates how church-led projects are enriching lives in some of Scotland's poorest communities.


There is a school of thought that the Church of Scotland should stop measuring its success or otherwise by bald membership statistics, and instead judge itself by less countable things such as lives touched and communities improved.

While it may well be that this is partly down to a desire to come up with a rosier public image than empty pews and closed buildings, it’s certainly true that the Church continues to have a positive impact on the lives of many thousands of people who are rarely if ever to be seen at services.

Possibly nowhere is this more pronounced than in the various youth projects going on all over the country, but especially in the ‘Priority Areas’ – the 64 parishes that make up the top 5% in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD).

They are the areas of Scotland with some of the worst problems – but also the scene of some of the Church’s greatest successes.

In the Blackhill/Provanmill area of north east Glasgow, which is 47th on the SIMD list, youth crime has dropped from 116 reported crimes in 2006 to two in 2016.

Much of the credit for this lies with St Paul’s Youth Forum, an arm’s-length charity which grew out of the youth club of St Paul’s Church.

Neil Young, who manages the project, says that its impact is based on ‘listening to young people, saying that we realise this is a problem, and asking what we can do to help’.

“There were a lot of problems with gang violence, and alcohol and drug abuse was rife, so a lot of our energy was directed towards working alongside the community, to create alternative ideas and outlooks.”

From a youth night for teenagers once a week, the Youth Forum has mushroomed into a seven-day-a-week operation with clubs for all ages, community youth radio station Bolt FM, residential trips, a food growing and cooking project and more.

All of this, Neil says, is driven by the young people themselves. “All these bits and pieces stem from the young people’s ideas, and we support and nurture them. They are the ones with the power and control, and our staff are there to support the young people’s dreams.

“There is a real sense of belonging. Some of the young people are here just about every day.

“We don’t bar anyone. We have worked with young people who have caused thousands and thousands of pounds of damage, but we have a message of grace. No matter what they do, we’ll say ‘see you tomorrow’ – and that’s really challenged a number of young people because they are expecting to be excluded.

“We are now dealing with kids with huge mental health issues, helping to mop up problems which social work services no longer have the capacity for. A number of them are in care, or being looked after through kinship care, and we’re just making sure they feel loved and wanted and know that they are cared for.”


Overseeing the Church’s Priority Areas engagement is the Priority Areas Committee within the Ministries Council, supported by a core team of six people based in Glasgow. Since late last year, the team has been headed up by Shirley Grieve, former manager of the Church’s Go For It fund (which helps fund many projects aimed at tackling poverty).

Shirley says that taking an ‘assets-based’ approach is fundamental to the Priority Areas work: building on what is already there, being led by local people, using expertise that already exists, and connecting communities and churches so they can share resources and experiences and learn from each other.

“‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us,’ is a statement of our principles,” says Shirley. “We would never parachute into an area with well-meaning ‘solutions’. Without the full involvement of local people – the real experts – the work wouldn’t be sustainable.”

One organisation which started as a Priority Areas project but is now an independent charity is theGKExperience. Their programme is in four parts, of which the highest-profile is probably the residential programme, including to the Abernethy Trust’s Glenkin centre from which the organisation takes its name.

“A residential experience is hugely transformational,” says project manager Alex Bauer. “It helps young people to develop in confidence and self-esteem. They learn life skills and access activities that often would not be accessible to young people from backgrounds of poverty – snowsports, abseiling, kayaking, canoeing – and they get to do them to a reasonably high level. We have got stories of young people who gone on to be outdoor instructors.”

The second part of their work is locally-based, working alongside congregations and communities. One example is the Milton Arts Project, run by Colston Milton Parish Church, which theGKExperience are supporting with a team of their own volunteers.

They also run a young leader programme, The Young Team; and finally, they have a programme which works with other agencies to provide additional intensive support for young people where needed.


A recurring theme of the Priority Areas work is attempting to lift the stigma associated with living in areas that are often perceived as synonymous with crime and drugs.

“One of the key messages for us is that these are good places, not problem areas,” says Shirley Grieve. “Good people live there and good things happen, but we need to support and be with local people.”

Arguably there is nowhere more notorious in Scotland than the Glaswegian suburb of Easterhouse.

“I love Easterhouse,” says Debbie McMahon, child and youth development worker at Easterhouse Parish Church, “And I find myself defending it quite a lot.”

Debbie manages BEE (Brighter East End), another church-based charity. They run after-school groups, creative arts groups, a youth group called Hive, and a fitness session for ages 14-plus. She tells the story of finding herself on a charity placement in Berkshire, and people there thinking of Easterhouse as a place full of crime. “It gets an unfair reputation,” she says.

But that association rubs off on local young people. “We recently did a project with some young people asking what they would change about Easterhouse. Out of anything they could have chosen they wanted to change other people’s perception of Easterhouse. They had such a terrible vision of how others perceived people, particularly young people, from the area.

“People think nobody works and everybody drinks and smokes, and it isn’t like that. There are so many good people and there is so much good stuff happening.”


While many of the Priority Areas are in Glasgow, it’s not just in the west that there’s poverty.

Rock Solid is yet another arms-length charity, set up by Douglas and Mid Craigie Church in Dundee.

Leader Neil Campbell says: “I was asked to see if we could develop something with the young people in the community. So I started working with a small group of about seven young people, who were in primary 7 at the time. It very quickly took off.”

They set up as a charity four years ago; and from that initial seven they now work with an average of about 60 different young people a week, through a range of different community-based activities and projects.

“We have a social enterprise group which makes crafts and sells them, and they choose how to reinvest the money. We also have an employability programme working with local schools and colleges, and we run a John Muir accredited outdoor education programme.”

Again, the emphasis is on young people taking as much of the responsibility as possible.

“We don’t believe in a top down approach,” says Neil. “We don’t tell young people what they should be doing, and we are not trying to run a programme of activities where we are doing things for or at young people.”

While the emphasis in all of these projects is mostly on community work rather than mission, it’s also clear that this sort of work is a crucial – maybe the only – way for churches to engage with young people who aren’t otherwise going to have anything to do with them.

Neil Young estimates that 90 per cent of the young people at St Paul’s believe in God, and 85 per cent of those pray regularly. He talks of fascinating conversations around faith amongst the many young people of varied backgrounds who use their services.

And Neil Campbell adds: “We do have young people who express interest in faith through coming here, and I run a youth fellowship group and we have now got a handful of young people involved in the church.

“It isn’t an either/or for us in the church – either we have to be a community based project and do away with religion, or we have a project which is overtly Christian which is set out to try and bring people into the church.

“The mission is both of those things. It’s doing the social justice and being missional as well, and they can complement each other and we can be honest about that.”


A longer version of this feature appears in June's Life and Work. Download or subscribe here.