First steps

Crossing the Line - part 13

It’s all very well hearing the call – but what do you do then?  Especially when you are 16 years old and still at school.

There was a lunch-time Christian group at school, but I had steered clear of it until now.  For a start, it didn’t have a very inspiring name.  Most schools and colleges had Christian Unions or Fellowships – we had the Christian Education Movement.  Usually this was abbreviated to CEM which was even less appealing.  It seemed like a name designed to put people off giving up their lunchtime.  It was certainly sterile enough for the secular agenda of the school.  It was safe.

In fact, I was only just old enough to go. 

My school was divided into a Boys Division and a Girls Division.  The two operated as two separate schools, a mirror image of each other in gender, ethos and architecture.  The buildings spread out along Chorley New Road in almost perfect symmetry, either side of a central arch.  On the right were the boys, on the left were the girls, with everything designed to ensure that the two should not meet.  Separate play grounds and sports fields, separate bus stops and separate Great Halls for assemblies, staring at each other across this central no-man’s land.  The Boys Division didn’t want the distraction of girls interrupting the finely tuned exam factory.  The Girls Division didn’t want those annoying boys getting in the way of producing ambitious young ladies.  When I started going out with Lesley from the Girls Division, it was mentioned at her next parents evening as something undesirable for a young lady studying hard.  There was almost no opportunity before 6^th Form for boys and girls to meet together yet somehow we had circumvented this prohibition by living in the same village.

Girls Division on the left - Boys on the right

In spite of this division, the Christian Education Movement was a mixed society of both boys and girls, so no-one below the age of 16 was allowed to go.  I had turned 16 a couple of months before my ‘Gotcha’ moment but trying out CEM was something I was still keen to avoid.

I think it was Lesley who got me there one Thursday lunchtime.  She had a close friend who went, and one day she suggested that I should go - and that she would go too.  The CEM met in the Tower Room just above the central arch which divided the schools.  It was the only room in the entire school which had doors that led directly to both the Boys and Girls Divisions.  It felt a little like entering a diplomatic neutral zone – a gendered DMZ between two opposing worlds.

When I got there, about 8 people were holding a Bible study and I saw a group of dispirited boys and girls with heads down listening to someone holding forth about his own views to the exclusion of everyone else.  It was just as I had feared.  On the way there, I had decided not to say anything at the meeting, keep a low profile and drift away at the end; but listening to this monologue dominating the proceedings and getting more and more aggressive, awakened something in me.  I tried to keep quiet, but the more I saw how everyone else had been cowed into submission, the less I was able to remain quiet.  Eventually I snapped.  I opened my mouth and out came something like, “Oh come off it!”  I can’t remember if those were my exact words, but they certainly express the sentiment of what I said.  Everyone looked up in shock. 

At the end of the meeting, the leader announced that they needed to elect a new member to the committee which organised CEM.  Before I knew what wat happening, and without offering, I had been elected.   “So much for keeping a low profile” summed up my thoughts as I went to afternoon classes.

Over the months which followed, we changed the whole feel of CEM.  Argumentative debates went out.  In came more prayer, music and fellowship.   Before I knew it, I was leading the committee, and we were booking more local ministers and preachers as visiting speakers.

Over the two years which followed, more and more people came.  We went from single figures to forty or fifty people on a good day with an exciting speaker or worship leader.  We got permission to start an early-morning prayer meeting each week, with about a dozen of us gathering at 8:15am to pray together for half an hour before school started. 

Who was the only one wearing sunglasses
for the school photo?

When churches in Bolton came together to organise a town-wide mission, I got permission to bring a Christian rock band into the Boys Division for a lunchtime concert in the theatre.  We could have filled the theatre twice over with those trying to get in, and I was invited by the headmaster to speak at the whole school assembly about the mission.  I told the story of meeting a drug addict at the mission meeting in the Town Hall the night before, and how he wanted to change, but didn’t think he could.  Perhaps we are all like that before God, I suggested to 800 of my peers.

It would be wrong of course, to suppose that this was all my doing.  We worked as a team.  God brought people to us.  Then they introduced their friends, and before we knew it, it was unusual to have less than 20 teenagers meeting together in this very secular school.  We met for prayer and reading the Bible together, for worship and for fellowship.

Alongside this, my father had changed parishes, and we had moved from the village at Blackrod into Bolton, close to the school.  There was no youth club or fellowship at the church, and before long I invited the handful of other teenagers to my room in the Vicarage for a kind of Youth Fellowship.  I had no idea what I was doing or supposed to do, but saw the need.  We prayed and read the Bible together and for many months it stayed at about 6 of us, (some under pressure from their parents) and nothing seemed to be happening.

Then I sensed God prompting me to talk about being Baptised in the Holy Spirit, sharing my story and how God had changed my life.  It started to strike a chord and others began to come.  Some were from the Christian Education Movement at Bolton School, but more were from other local schools.  David and Catherine from Smithills School came and started to bring others.  David was very gifted on the guitar, and a natural salesman.  Catherine was the quiet and highly practical person that every group needs to flourish.  Then Neil came and introduced us to 100% Proof – not a whisky but a Christian Heavy Rock Band with a sound like AC/DC!  We started taking other people to their concerts around Manchester and as they shared their Christian faith without compromise, others saw that you could be a Christian without being a wimp! There were others too like Janet, Tim, Robin and Douglas – too many to mention.  We all grew in faith and learned to encourage others in theirs.

100% Proof in Concert

In time,  St Margaret’s Youth Group grew out of my room into the Vicarage dining Room.  Then it out-grew the dining room and took over the living room.  When finally we could not squeeze anyone else into the Vicarage, it had to move to the new Church Hall and continued to grow, with David leading after I left home for a gap year before university.

St Margaret’s Church was in a fairly ordinary part of Bolton surrounded by traditional streets of terraced housing and the old cotton mills for which Lancashire was once famous, now empty and silent.  The church had a problem with vandalism.  It had huge windows at the back made up of thousands of squares of glass held together in a lead lattice.  One of the jobs over the weekend was to sweep up the broken glass from the stones which had been thrown to break them.  One weekend my dad counted over 100 broken panes of glass in the church.  It was just too tempting for kids with nothing to do.

So what could we do about it?  That was the question.  The Youth Group started to organise “St Maggie’s Discos” for teenagers, in the Church Hall (it was the end of the 70’s when discos were still cool).  At the first one, about 50 turned up.  By the 3^rd or 4^th, we were turning people away because we had already filled the hall with around 300 young people.

The discos were never problem free and we couldn’t have done it without the stalwart support of some of the men in the church who controlled the door and provided back-up if anything started to get out of hand.  One night when we were preparing for a disco, a phone-call came from the police.  They had received a tip-off saying that a knife fight was being planned between two local gangs, at our disco.  Cancelling was not an option.  The idea of having 300+ young people in the street outside the church with nowhere to go was not a good plan.  When they were inside, we could ensure there was no alcohol, but outside, they would have been knocking back the Tenants Extra or Strongbow unabated.

We decided to go ahead, with two plain clothed CID officers in the Church Hall and 2 police riot vans parked up a couple of streets away.  Soon after the disco started, David and I found out which gangs were planning to fight, and got their leaders together.  We said to them, “If you do this, this will be the last St Maggie’s Disco ever.  Everyone will suffer.”  To our amazement, they gave us their word that there would be no fighting at the disco that night.  We learned later that they adjourned to a local park after the disco to settle their scores after the disco had finished, but they respected what we were offering to teenagers with nothing to do, and they didn’t want to be the ones who put an end to it.

Alongside this, the vandalism on the church dropped to zero without the church ever having to get anyone arrested or charged or taken to court.

Some of St Margaret's Youth Group on a Good Friday Walk

We also found that some of the disaffected young people who came to the discos also started to come to church and the Youth Group.  Side by side, posh pupils from Bolton School and teenagers with drink problems and criminal records were praying and worshipping together.  We even had one teenage girl whose Saturday job was as a prostitute until she gave her life to Christ in the Youth Group.

Reflecting on those first steps in ministry, I am amazed by two things.

First was the trust which was placed in us by my dad and our local church.  We were left to run the Youth Group ourselves without interference.  We planned the worship, led the Bible studies, wrote the talks, prayed and ministered to each other and those in need.  We saw God heal broken hearts and soften hardened hearts as we prayed, without the need to call a grown-up in to do the 'important stuff'.  While recognising the need for good safeguarding in youth work, I wonder if we now tend to professionalise it too much, rather than letting young people reach young people.

Second is how God honoured everything that we did.  As I look back to that time, I can’t believe how much I crammed in.  I was doing my A-levels, working a part time job, was in a 3-year committed relationship with my girlfriend and leading a youth ministry the size of most churches.  By rights, it should have all collapsed in a heap at some point, and yet it didn’t.  I even finished my A-levels with four grade A’s – something I couldn’t have even imagined a few years earlier.  God honoured the commitment which had been required of me and I was not alone.  The other leaders all went on to college and university. 

Neil, Benny and Tim drawing attention
to themselves at Greenbelt

I guess both of these things come back to trust.  Trust in the God who calls us, and trust in one another.  I wonder how much we miss out on because of our reluctance to do either.  I remember an former bishop of Southwark Cathedral advising his clergy to experiment; to see what would work and what wouldn’t in their parishes.  Experiment, experiment and then experiment some more.  He recognised that some of these experiments would go wrong but then we pick ourselves up and learn from them.  The other option is always playing it safe, repeating the things which have worked in the past until they finally bury themselves.  For young people in particular, this is simply not an option in a fast changing society.

Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of being in touch with a good number of people from St Maggie’s Youth Group, and I am constantly delighted and amazed by the way so many have carried on with their Christian faith.  Some are even worship leaders, pastors and vicars.  All through the trust which was placed in us by the church in our teenage years. 

It is perhaps worth remembering that the greatest calling of all time was entrusted to a teenage girl in a village in the middle of nowhere.  Perhaps the church should be looking for more teenagers to invest with trust?

Click here for part 14 - Moving on

Click here for an introduction to 'Crossing the Line'

Real or imaginary?

Crossing the Line - part 10

Starting senior school was great.

When I joined the prep school, I joined a year late.  Everyone else started there aged 8, and I joined a class where everyone knew each other and knew how the school worked.  I knew no-one and every day was a new experience of uncertainty and finding my way.

When we moved up to the senior school, all the prep school classes were jumbled up and we were joined by an equal number of boys who were new.  This time I was one of the boys who already had friends and knew how the school worked.  I soon found my place in our new class, manipulated the seating plan so that I sat with my friends, and discovered a new confidence.

Not that my academic achievement improved.  I was still bottom of the class in English and Maths but there were new subjects to get stuck into.  Some like Latin were a disaster but others, like Physics and Geography caught my imagination.

By half way through my second year I had successfully partitioned my life.  At home I was the vicar’s kid.  I sang in the church choir, attended church without complaint and was polite to everyone.  At school I was a typical pre-teen, starting to discover a bigger world and make my own decisions.  I was also very careful to keep the two apart.  I got the occasional detention after school but not enough to attract much attention.  The only time my parents were called into school was after I threw my bag across the classroom at another boy after an argument.  He ducked and my bag smashed a large glazed print of Picasso’s Guernica on the wall behind him, showering him in broken glass.  That was a bit difficult to hide.

I learned the art of not getting caught when I broke the rules.  The class I was in had an obsession with gambling, and I discovered an entrepreneurial streak, renting out packs of cards and poker dice to my classmates on condition that my name was kept out of it if they got caught.  I kept my stock of cards in the class library desk.  After the key to the desk had been lost, I was the only person who could pick the lock and was rewarded by being appointed the class librarian.  It was the perfect hiding place and before long I was also storing my classmates inevitable ‘dirty mags’ there too, for a fee.  As a result, if our classroom was searched during lunch or break (when classrooms were out of bounds) nothing untoward would be found. 

Increasingly however, I began to recognise the emerging contradiction in the two lives I was living.  The Christian faith which I lived at home and my school persona were pulling in two opposite directions.  I realised that I would have to choose one or the other.  One night, I remember coming to the conclusion that I needed to decide whether this God who I had been brought up to believe in was actually real.  If he was real, there was no question in my mind – I had to follow him wholeheartedly.  But if he wasn’t real, I could do whatever I wanted!  To be honest, I was looking forward to the latter.  I had discovered a rebellious part to my personality which didn’t like obeying rules and my fear of authority was waning fast.  I wanted to run my own life, making my own decisions unencumbered by divine expectations.

Over the 12 months which followed however, God left me in no doubt that he was real.

The first part of my reality check came as my parents started to explore Charismatic Renewal.  The years at Blackrod and the abortive defection to Rome had resulted in a dry period for their faith.  They both faithfully continued to follow God’s calling, but the joy and sense of direction had gone.

Then mum read a book called “Nine o’clock in the morning” which talked about a renewed faith, lived in the tangible presence of God through the power of the Holy Spirit.  After patient perseverance, she persuaded dad to read it too.  Soon they began to look for events and meetings to explore this ‘new life in the Holy Spirit’.  Manchester wasn’t far away and there were lots of opportunities there.  It was in the days when preachers like Colin Urquhart and David Watson were filling major venues, and my parents took me along to the meetings with them.

For the first time, I saw Christians who actually looked like they were enjoying their faith.  I heard contemporary worship songs with a beat and saw people enraptured as they sang them.  I also heard stories of God’s healing, of smuggling bibles behind the iron curtain, and saw people being ministered to in prayer.  This was a new, vibrant, exciting Christianity and while part of me had reservations, and some of the things were more than a little strange, I recognised something significant was at work here.

The second part of my reality check was much more disturbing and happened a long way from home. 

When I was 12, I went on a school trip to Paris with a coachload of boys from my year.  During my first night there, on the 7^th floor of the hotel, I tried to kill myself in my sleep.

I had always had a problem with dreams, as long as I remember.  I used to have night terrors as a small child.  As I grew older, I began sleepwalking and the dreams became more violent, resulting in me hitting or kicking my parents more than once as they tried in vain to wake me.  Although I never told anyone, I also heard voices from time to time, calling my name.

That evening in Paris, I heard the voices again, but for the first time they were angry.  That night, in the hotel room I was sharing with two others, I dreamt that I was responsible for the deaths of millions of people.  The feeling of panic and remorse was so vivid and I couldn’t live with myself.  I got out of bed, walked over to the balcony doors and tried to open them.  One of my room-mates woke up and asked me what I was doing.  I replied “I’m going to kill myself”.  My plan was simple.  I was going to get out onto the balcony and jump off, seven floors down to the concrete below.

What saved me was being unable to open the doors.

There was no reason for that.  There was no lock on the doors, and we had been out on the balcony earlier that evening without difficulty.  Now the doors would not open, no matter how hard I pushed and pulled on the handle.  After a few moments of futile frustration, I realised that my roommates had turned on the light and were starting to get out of bed.  I stormed into the bathroom, locked myself in and started to run a bath with the intention of drowning myself.  Looking back, I realise how futile this would have been, but at that moment, the wish to die was so much stronger than the will to live, and any possibility of achieving this was an option.

As the bath slowly filled, something began to change in me.  The will to live started to resurface.  Although I still believed that I had killed millions of people, something inside me started to draw me back towards life rather than death.  As that feeling grew within me, the strength to live began to grow too, until after what seemed like an age, I reached out and pulled out the plug.  The water started to drain away.

That was the last thing I remember of that night.  My roommates told me in the morning that I came out of the bathroom, threw myself on the bed and didn’t stir until morning.  When I awoke, the memory of the previous might was still in my mind, but I thought it was simply a horrible dream.  It is hard to overstate the shock when they told me it actually happened.  I was terrified.  What if it happened again tonight, or another night?  What if the doors to the balcony opened next time?

During the day we went to the Sacré Coeur Basilica. Amid the throngs of tourists, I managed to find a quiet corner set aside for prayer.  There I sat, pouring out my fears and bewilderment.  As I did this, I found a strange peace enfolding me, and a sense that God was putting his arms around me, saying, “I am here, and I will protect you”.  It wasn’t a voice, but something deeper and stronger.  I left there with a remarkable sense of assurance that everything would be ok.

What I didn’t know until later was that back in England, my mother had woken up and the same time as my ordeal the night before, with a strong sense that they needed to pray for me. 

While I was in France they had travelled to stay at Whatcombe House in Dorset.  At that time, it housed a charismatic community of healing called the Barnabas Fellowship.  While they were there mum was healed both emotionally, from many of the traumas of her childhood, and physically, from increasingly severe arthritis. It was a turning point for them in their Christian faith.  At the very time I was distraught and trying to kill myself, she was waking dad to pray for me.  The coincidence was uncanny and to this day, I believe that their prayer is what stopped me being able to open those balcony doors.

I saw that God was real.

When I got back home and told them what had happened, they were horrified and then deeply worried.  I was taken to the doctor and referred for psychiatric tests.  I remember being wired up for an EEG scan (Electroencephalogram) to look for any abnormalities in my brain patterns.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, there were also worries about schizophrenia.  In the end, all the tests came back ok, but my parent’s understandable fear remained, and they took me to see a wise Christian leader in the Anglican charismatic movement called John Gunstone.  After we talked for a while, he said some simple prayers with me, casting out any evil spirit which may be behind my experiences.  I have never been the sort of Christian who sees demons around every corner or spiritual warfare as the reason for every testing time, but I do know this; after his simple and undramatic prayers with me, I never heard the voices calling my name again and my night terrors stopped.

I now knew that God was real – and I knew that I had to follow.

Click here for part 11 - Spiritual gifts, sarcasm and sex

Click here for an introduction to "Crossing the Line"

Finding me

Crossing the Line - part 9

Bolton School took quite a bit of getting used to.

Compared with the church school in Blackrod, it was a different world.

I had never had to wear a school uniform and never carried a bag to school.  Now there I was on my first day in my grey trousers, black shoes, white shirt and school tie, with a blue blazer, gabardine raincoat and school cap, carrying a briefcase, gym kit and games bag.

We each had our own desk to keep our books in.  We sat in neat rows and each boy was assigned his own non-negotiable place in the class room.  No sitting with your friends here.

A school ‘Sergeant’ kept order in the corridors and bellowed with a drill sergeant’s voice if someone dared to run in school or disobeyed the strict one-way system on the stairs.  He was also the person who looked after you if you were ill or injured at games, revealing a caring compassionate side which was equally shocking the first time anyone encountered it!

Lunch was taken in a huge hall seating 450 pupils, seated at regimented tables of 11 with a teacher or monitor (prefect) at the head, keeping discipline.  Food came out to each table in serving dishes with 11 plates and was served by those at the head of the table to everyone else.  It was almost always meat or pies and 2 veg, with the occasional adventurous curry. Pudding was almost always hot; spotted dick or treacle tart with custard, or on bad days semolina or rice pudding.  There was never a choice and you had to eat everything before your empty place was passed back up the table to be cleared away.  More challenging was that the whole sitting had to be finished in 20 minutes, from arrival in the hall, through grace, two courses, clearing away, to the hall being empty again.  This was to allow time to reset everything for the second sitting of the older half of the school who repeated the same routine.  This left a lasting legacy in my life – the complete inability to eat slowly, even now, decades later.

Teachers often wore black teaching gowns.  Registration was in the style of Rowan Atkinson’s immortal sketch.  Discipline was strict and I remember coming home at the end of my first day and telling my parents with astonishment how quiet it had been.  I wasn’t used to silence in class.  I had also never had homework before, and remember sitting down at home with my first English homework thinking ‘what do I do now?’

For me, at nine years old, the whole effect was almost on a par with Harry Potter arriving in Hogwarts for the first time.

The ethos of the school was also determinedly secular.  We had assemblies with prayers, but it was done with a definite sense of “let’s get this over with”.  RE was relegated to the statutory minimum in the timetable and seen as an outdated irrelevance by all but one or two teachers.  The school was dedicated to achievement, competition and success.  Our termly school reports gave every pupil an exact statement of where they were in the pecking order by revealing not just a grade but also your mark as a percentage and your position in class.   This ranking system applied to every academic subject except RE where writing anything down or marking our participation was seen as superfluous.

I went straight in at 28^th out of 28 in all the main subjects and stayed there for several years.  After being top of the class at the village school in Blackrod this was a bit of a shock and left me more than a little bewildered.  In the village school, I didn’t have to try to be at the top of the class.  Now I couldn’t get off the bottom, no matter how hard I tried!

To progress to the senior school at 11, we all had to pass another competitive exam with over 600 applicants for 128 places each year.  Boys at the Prep School were expected to sail through without any difficulty but a few months before the exam, my parents were called in to the see the headmaster.  It was not because I had been naughty but because the school didn’t expect me to pass.

Looking back, I think this was the wake-up call I needed.  It snapped me out of the state of shock I had been living in.  If I didn’t up my game now, I would be out.  Over the next few months, mum coached me in English and dad in Maths, and on the day of my 11^th birthday, I sat the 2½ hour exam, determined to give it my best shot. I then waited to be called in for an interview, often used to sift the borderline applicants and when no invitation came, I was convinced I had failed.

So it was a huge surprise when some weeks later the letter arrived, offering me a place at the senior school.  I didn’t know how but I had made it.

My reasons for wanting to stay there were not about academic aspiration.  They were more to do with identity. At Bolton School I wasn’t the vicar’s kid, just another pupil.  The expectations on me were the same as on every other boy at the school, not tailor made with unspoken moral requirements or religious overtones.  No-none put me on a pedestal or eagerly awaited my fall from it.  I had begun to learn who I was, rather than inhabiting a persona which had been created for me, and I didn’t want to go back.

Although I started there a year later than my classmates, I had begun to make friends who simply knew me as “Hazlehurst” (first names were almost never used) and I began to discover who I was and who I wanted to be.  I also toughened up.  Although I was never good at sport, the school’s rigorous expectations around football, rugby and cricket meant that I couldn’t retreat to the side-lines, away from the action.  I remember going back to visit the village school in Blackrod after a couple of terms and joining in a game of playground football with such vigour that they called me ‘Battling Ben’ by the end.

I had discovered a new me, or rather, I was discovering who ‘me’ was.  I didn’t want anything to drag me back into a school environment where others thought they knew who I was.  If I had failed the entrance exam, I would have received a good education at my local secondary school.  My best friend Chris went there and went on to read Law at university.  My desire to stay at Bolton School was deeper than that.

I needed to be free to find myself.

Click here for part 10 - Real or imaginary?

Click here for an introduction to "Crossing the Line"