Sacred Building, Secular Club

1. Sacred Building, Secular Club Understanding the youth club as a contested space.

2. Overview • Describe the history and present situation at a youth café attached to a church • Consider the youth café as a ‘contested space’

3. Methodology • 4 organisations: Church, Church-based youth café, Community centre, Local Authority centre. • Ethnographic study: • ~90 observations • ~8 focus groups with young people • ~25 interviews with youth workers and managers • Part of a wider PhD considering how ‘professional boundaries’ are negotiated between workers and young people in practice.

4. Sacred Building? • Opened 2003 with EU funding. • Attached to a Baptist church (literally). • Evangelical church. Implicit evangelistic aims. • The hope of ‘discipleship’ • Differences between formal, espoused and operant theology (Cameron et al. 2010, Gallagher 2005).

5. Secular club? • Current workers are not practicing Christians. • ‘Typical’ cycle followed: (For example, Goode 2006)

6. Youth workers, management committee, and young people Church members and leaders Conflict “You’re only here because you’re a Christian” “They don’t care about the kids. They just care about the building and the bills” “This isn’t how it was supposed to be. This is a place of discipleship” “They want Christian workers, but you can’t get funding for that” “If we get a playstation, they can’t use it. They’ll break it” “If we can’t use the playstation, I’ll put a cover on the pool table” “[The youth workers] are lone rangers”

7. Contest spaces • Schmelzkopf (1995) & New York Community Gardens, and Valentine (2001): • Differing ideologies on the purpose of the space. • Negotiations over resources and threats of the removal of privileges. • Conflict over control. • Removal of groups of people from the space. • Spaces of apprehension and insecurity. • Aesthetics mirror uncertainty and fear.

8. Youth café as a contested space? • A space for young people to drop in versus a space of active discipleship and evangelism • Tension over use of shared resources. Some groups of young people prevented from using church resources. • Conflict over who applies for funding and who attends funding meetings. • Church members and leaders having greater sanctions than youth workers. • Lack of funding, very low numbers of young people. • Badly maintained building, broken equipment and resources. • Differing ideologies on the purpose of the space. • Negotiations over resources and threats of the removal of privileges. • Conflict over control. • Removal of groups of people from the space. • Spaces of apprehension and insecurity. • Aesthetics mirror uncertainty and fear.

9. Conclusion • Is the youth café best conceived of as a contested space? • Yes. • What are the implications of this on the youth club and the young people? • Not sure… but it seems an important stage in, or possibly cause of, the process of movement from church ownership to estrangement in community projects.

10. References Cameron, H, Bhatti, D, Duce, C, Sweeney, J and Watkins, C (2010) Talking about God in Practice Norwich: SCM press Gallagher, S. K. (2005) 'Building Traditions: Comparing Space, Ritual, and Community in Three Congregations', Review of Religious Research, 47(1), 70-85. Goode, J. (2006) 'Faith-based organizations in Philadelphia: Neoliberal ideology and the decline of political activism', Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 203-236 Schmelzkopf, K. (1995) 'Urban community gardens as contested space', Geographical Review, 85(3), 364-381 Valentine, G. (2001) Social geographies: space and society, Pearson College Division

11. Peter.hart@dur.ac.uk www.dur.ac.uk/peter.hart @youthworkerpete Understanding the youth club as a contested space. Sacred Building, Secular Club: