Matt Wilson is Executive Director of Mission for the Message Trust, from whence have hailed such phenomena as The World Wide Message Tribe and the Eden project – no that’s not the big domes in Cornwall; this is a way of doing mission that has been transforming the council estates of Manchester (and many other places that have been inspired by Eden’s work) for the last ten years. The lovely Jo Herbert met with Matt in the Salvation Army training college in south London, far away from his Manchester homelands.
To find out more about Eden click here. To buy Matt’s book, Eden: called to the streets click here.
Jo: Tell us what do you do? What does your job entail?
Matt: Well I’ve got a very people orientated job I suppose. The Message Trust have been a defining thing in my life for the last ten years or so. That dates right back to the years of the Tribe, when I used to get involved in helping out after the events – no I didn’t jump around on stage or anything like that.
Jo: (with a cheeky grin) Did you ever want to be in the Tribe?
Matt: I think everybody who hung around at that stage secretly wanted to put on one of those silly tracksuits and jump around!
But for me as a new Christian – that was the mid nineties – even the fact that I could be a Christian and be allowed to listen to dance music… my early Christian life, upbringing had been in quite a legalistic setting.
I went well off the rails in my teenage years, like lots of people do, that was the late eighties, early nineties, rave music had just been invented, so that was like, wow, this is amazingly special! So coming out of the whole club scene, and thinking I was leaving it behind and then discovering that oh, there are Christians who like, use this music to like communicate the Gospel to people, this is amazing, so I got involved with the Tribe at that level. When they did their concert in a school I’d be there in the little counselling room afterwards talking to kids who had made responses about Jesus. The way the ministry of the Message was working at the time, it was very much go to a school for a week, there’d be lots of responses, we’d pray with the kids afterwards, there would be people from the local church there, and we’d hope the local church would do a good job of follow up. Typically in the suburban areas where they had resources and full time paid youth workers they’d do a better job than in the schools in the urban areas where you were lucky if you could even find a partner church and if you could it was full of old ladies; they’d have a lovely heart, but they just could not deal with these young people coming fresh in off the streets.
That was the story of the first ever Eden project, in Wythenshawe: schools missions in local schools, leading to a big concert, loads of kids responded, literally like a hundred kids responded to the gospel, and we’d always give them the invitation: ‘if you can, come to church on Sunday’ – this would have been on the Friday night y’know – great we’ll pray with you. And they all turned up on the Sunday to this little local church which had about 25 people in it and 100 kids with their cats and dogs in tow and all that kinda thing and they all turn up and the tragedy was not being able to cope with that because it wasn’t resourced properly. So the pain of watching these kids disappear, because as itinerant evangelists you never quite see the outcome of decisions. So just lingering around for a little bit longer brought that realisation into sharp focus, ‘ah pants, does this happen everywhere we go; that kids just fall away so quickly and so easily?’ And out of that pain really, that was what Eden was born out of. What would it take to really enable these young people to become disciples, rather than just people who have made decisions?
So Andy Hawthorne and a few other people got about the job of recruiting a team to move into the local area. I was part of that team and that was ten years ago. We called it Eden, and it was a really exciting time,
Jo: How long were you in Eden?
Matt: Well we started laying the foundations of that ‘95/96, I actually moved into the area in ’97. I moved out in 2000, so I didn’t stick around all that long for various reasons which would be too long and convoluted to go into in this interview, but it was an amazing time really. A very difficult intense time; it was the number one most deprived ward in the UK at the time.
I personally believe, and at the Message this is a belief that we share, that God has just put amazing potential into young peoples lives and we want to see that potential realised. We know it’s not going to be realised unless they have an encounter with Jesus, so that why we do it. But the encounter with Jesus is not the end in itself, that’s his invitation: ‘come into the life that I have prepared for you.’ So we’ve got a whole discipleship ethos as well, it’s evangelism and discipleship. We know that until those young people have reached the place where they can really genuinely make a go of their life, that they overcome some of the issues and challenges they’re struggling with, our job's not done really. So that’s where working in partnership with local church can hopefully see a much higher percentage of them making that successful transition. This is why it’s long term work: because it’s a transition actually into the stable adult life. If we meet when they’re eleven or twelve that means we’re going to be in their life for a long time until they can stand on their own two feet.
Jo: So was the Wythenshawe event, when these 100 kids turned up, was that a defining moment from going from one approach to another?
Matt: I think if you track anybody’s story, whether it’s a personal story or whether it’s the story of a movement, you get these kind of crunch points when, you have these lucid moments when it all becomes clear: ‘you know what, something’s got to change.’ And then that produces a kinda will: ‘we’ve got to do this, we can’t just let this continue.’ So yeah, that was a huge milestone in the ministry of the Message. If you read any of the books that we’ve published, not just the Eden book, but Andy’s Diary of a Dangerous Vision it details the way that that was such a turning point for us as a ministry.
Jo: Why the ‘incarnational’ approach?
Matt: It was just purely pragmatic; recognising that here is a community with a high percentage of young people with zilch-o provision. The local schools would do their best to cater for those kids that bothered to attend between 9:00am and 3.30pm; the rest of them were out there with very little, so statutory youth provision was non-existent for those kids; nobody was there for them. There were empty houses, every other house was boarded up, everybody wanted to get of the area, nobody wanted to live there and when we spoke to the local council and said we were interested in taking on tenancies in the area, they couldn’t believe it, they thought we were having a laugh ‘you mean you want to move into Bench Hill and you want to pay us rent for these houses?’ – they just couldn’t believe it. But it was an interesting time when we had to move into houses that were sub-standard, that had been derelict, that had not been lived in. There had been steel shutters on the windows. So literally, the way they used to do it because the area was so insecure was that when you arrived you’d turn up with your belongs and then literally as you were moving in, the guys from the council would come and they’d remove the steel shutters off the windows. But that’s when you’d find out you didn’t have any hot water or that someone had stolen the boiler or the radiators leaked or you didn’t have any electricity or whatever. So there were a lot of shenanigans in the early days of moving in.
Jo: In the ‘incarnational’ approach, what’s the role of the local church? Why do you choose to work through local church?
Matt: Well partly we chose to work through local church because at the time there was a lot of hype around youth church, and we just felt uncomfortable about the concept of youth church. We knew that one of the problems for the young people was that they had become dislocated from family ties so their experience of normative human relationships was very minimal. So part of the rationale behind being part of a local church was simply that if we could begin to introduce young people to the family of the church, that, in a sense, may be able to act as a surrogate for parenting they’ve never had. So that might be multi-generational; they might have spiritual Mum’s and Dad’s, spiritual grandmas and grandads. So that was a key feature of it.
But saying that, I think it was the default position anyway of that first team. I don’t think it was ever on the agenda to not do it though local church. It was just kind of understood at a fairly deep level that the church is God’s plan for the world. There were no advantages to not working through the local church. The local church provided a very helpful pastoral environment for the team. Like many churches that meet in urban locations, typically very few of the actual members and attendees of the local church actually lived in the local neighbourhood, they’ll tend to commute in – that’s often the story in urban areas. But even so it provided a helpful support; y’know the team leader of that team was nineteen, and many of the guys who were on the project were only eighteen, nineteen, twenty; we were all very young. Pastoral care, the oversight of that mission team, also came through the local church, because the stresses on what are essentially urban missionaries are high, the demand is high, the potential for burnout is high. So the pastoral environment of the local church, just simply towards the team was very helpful as well.
Jo: Are there negatives of working with the local church as well?
Matt: Well now that we’ve done ten of these Eden teams I think we can speak a bit more authoritatively on that question of working through the local church, or with the local church, however you want to put it. As the book describes, we’ve done about half of the ten with existing local churches and about half have been church plants. So there did come a point where we were feeling led to establish Eden in the most difficult part of the city where there really was no candidate church to host the project. There were just no viable partners in some parts of the city that were really difficult, so we planted. But we’ve worked with a really broad base, ecclesiologically. We’ve worked with local parish churches; we’ve worked with bouncing of the walls charismatic and apostolic churches and various shades in between – all of a kind of evangelical ilk. But I think the thing about church planting is that you’ve not got an existing church culture to have to try and change, because even if a church has been planted over the last three, four or five years, it’ll have already its own established sub-culture and personalities who may hold certain levels of power and decision-making ability. And so the thing about church planting is simply the ability to start from scratch. The disadvantages: an existing local church may have existing resources, both financial and people resources and may hopefully already have a good reputation already within the community. They may have a coffee morning that the older people like coming along to, or they do something cool for mums and tots or that kind of thing. So that existing credibility of the local church, which has been the case, for instance, with some of the Anglican churches we’ve worked with, where they’ve got a presence and a reputation that’s been good, so we’ve been able to stand on that. A lot of these communities we’re working with are very traditional so they will have a very sensitive ‘cult radar’ and if it’s not church the way they understand it you are open to accusations and rumours, particularly if there’s lots of you and you all share houses and wear funny clothes and have silly haircuts and all arrive all of a sudden and those kind of things! So we’ve learnt over the year how to not give the impression of being a cult.
[pause]
As soon as we got rid of the white robes that helped.
Jo: [laughs] What does it feel like to work with this approach. I guess not many people would do this, maybe an extreme approach in terms of reaching the young people you work with. What’s the reality of that? How does it feel?
Matt: Two things I could say very quickly there. One is that it very often feels very ordinary. It is a plod. There will be days when it feels like nothing’s happening, and that it’s possibly even pointless, that it’s going nowhere. Then there’ll be seasons of breakthrough which will be a great relief, cos you’ll realise that God does exist after all! And then secondly I think a lot of our team members would say that one of the biggest challenges they face is not being able to switch off, not being able to hide. So the knocks on the door will be constant and you’re living your life in a goldfish bowl really. Your behaviour will be observed and judged by people in the community and because the communities we’re working in are volatile you never know quite what’s going to happen next and how you may be drawn into it. So there is that sense of always being slightly on edge, never quite knowing what’s going to happen next. And learning to live with that is a challenge for all of us. I often describe it a bit like learning to hold your breath under water and I sometimes wonder is it possible for us to develop gills. So, if I can just use this metaphor for a little while, people when they first arrive, they’ll need to leave the area often, which is kind of their way of breathing. It’s like diving into the area, and then they’ll have to go back to their parent’s house at the weekend and it’s like [Matt does an admirable impression of someone who’s just come up for air] and then going back in again. But, a bit like a pearl diver, you develop lungs for it. But then can you go the next evolutionary step, can you develop gills, can you learn to breathe underwater? I think this is the exiting bit about being incarnational. There’s a funny transition that can happen when someone stops seeing themselves as a missionary and starts seeing the community as their home. And the minute it becomes home, everything changes. And we find the people who get to that place of making it their home, of really identifying with it, being able to celebrate it, even for all its fallen-ness, that they will defend it and speak well of it – they’re the people who for when five years comes they don’t even notice, it’s not a date on a calendar ticked off, they’re just thinking, I’m here, this is where I want to be, this is where I want to bring up my kids, maybe even this is where I want my ashes to be scattered.
Jo: That’s interesting. Because I think most people wouldn’t see this as ordinary. But you’re just living out life in a location that you wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise.
Matt: The challenge there is the challenge not to become numb. Not to hide from some of the more obvious fallen-ness of the community. You see things that shocked you once upon a time, but they aren’t shocking you anymore. So retaining that sensitivity is another key thing for team members. Developing a spirituality that allows them to live in that place of tension between being faced with situations that are so far from God’s ideal and not becoming numb to that, it not becoming the norm; recognising that the transforming power of the gospel is always there and is available.
Jo: What would you say to other youth leaders around the country who wanted to replicate Eden?
Matt: In the early years of Eden when there was a lot of hype about it and a lot of people inviting us to go and do Eden in other places, we felt that this model isn’t properly tested, it just felt so fragile. And so for 10 years we’ll just do them in Manchester where we can carefully nurture the whole concept. But now we are about to embark on some Edens in other areas. We facilitate an annual visitor weekend, for instance, where if people are interested in what we do they’ll come along and we can talk to them in depth and then they might go somewhere, y’know, off back to where they come from and do their own equivalent, but not call it Eden. We will do Edens in other areas though; we’re looking at Sheffield and I’m sure other cities will follow as well.
Probably the first thing we’d say is that the long-term commitment is essential. That means that if someone starts up an initiative there’s a way of managing the miracle, which means it’s a way of ministry that’s more sustainable. One of the things we’ve had – we’ll be honest about it – in the first few years, we just burnt a lot of people out. It’s not just the stresses and strains of being in these difficult areas and environments, but trying to sustain a very high level of programme intensity, busyness, that sort of thing. So there’s a rhythm of life you can approach the thing with. You approach a marathon in a different way than you approach a sprint. In the same way you approach incarnational ministry in a different way you approach itinerant evangelism or event-driven evangelism. It’s geared in a whole different way. So the first thing is to reflect on that when it comes to recruiting a team. Young people in urban areas have got so much instability in their lives, people coming and going; they might have had umpteen different men in and out of the house. It’s unlikely that they’ve had a stable home environment. The average youth worker stays in their post for about two years, something like that. That just can’t be allowed to happen in the inner-city, because it’s just counter-productive for young people.
Also, if you’re getting involved in that kind of incarnational ministry it’s got to be holistic. The needs of the young people really need to be considered. And even if the team hasn’t got the expertise to meet all those needs then there needs to be that openness to work in partnership with others, and even others who may not necessarily be ‘Christians’. We might have to partner with some secular organisations and we might have to refer some of these kids, so we can’t have a controlling attitude towards them. We’ve got to see their discipleship as a holistic process. God cares for whole people and not just ‘souls’.
Jo: Obviously the Eden model has worked in the inner city. What about lots of youth leaders in suburban areas. How does that work there in that setting?
Matt: You’re asking the wrong guy, I don’t do it in that setting! But they can apply to join Eden if they want!
Jo: So that’s your advice, up and leave?!
Matt: Well statistically the vast majority of church-employed youth workers will be in suburban areas because the churches in the urban areas can’t afford them. So I would argue that the inner-city ought to be the default calling unless God says otherwise, rather than the suburbs being the default and the urban being the called – I just think there’s something about where the weight of the need is; surely there ought to be some compulsion to be there. If I don’t turn the screw on this point then I would be doing myself an injustice. There has to be that bias towards the areas of need where the kingdom is least.
But I think the same holistic principles bear out for young people everywhere. I mean young people are young people aren’t they and they can see through our spiritual dualism which validates them as, ‘ok you’ve made a decision for Christ so we’ll be very happy to teach you the Bible and very happy to rev you up with some happy songs,’ but we’ve got to get into the nuts and bolts of their potential as an individual and how they’re going to use it for the good of the kingdom of God in the world. So that means helping them overcome their challenges, it means working with them on the areas of gift and talent that they’ve got, seeing that released in a kingdom way and not a self-serving way. So I’d hope that would bear out in any context.
Jo: You give loads of stories and examples in your book, but is there a short story that shows that holistic approach. What does it look like?
Matt: One of the things that blessed my socks off… There’s this girl called Sam* who we first met when she was about ten or eleven, in a very difficult part of north-Manchester and life was difficult for her and it got worse when her Dad got sent to prison, which put a lot of strain on her Mum. That really affected her behaviour, she became very difficult at school – understandably, she was just very confused and very mixed up emotionally. And then we had a phone call to say that her Dad had died. She was in touch with our Eden team, they were spending time with her, giving her an outlet for all this. Then her Mum got a new boyfriend who moved in; he used to drink a lot, he was violent – he wasn’t actually violent towards Sam*, but towards Sam’s* Mum. He was just a pain to be with. And through this process – we start discipleship as soon as we meet a young person – there came a point where Sam* accepted Jesus Christ and decided she wanted to follow him. And the first prayer she prayed, privately on her own, was ‘God, I want you to get rid of this guy who’s in my house.’ She prayed earnestly and sincerely and repeatedly that God would just make him go away – this was the state that she was in. And he did. He just woke up one morning, packed his bags and left. She saw that as huge answer to prayer and since he got out the way things have really looked up for Sam*. She’s a fantastic football player, she started achieving at school again, she started getting aspirations for her life, cos one of the things we find, over and over again in the inner city is what we’d call a poverty of aspiration. Never ever had a role model, never had anybody who’s demonstrated anything of achievement in life, of putting their talent to good use, we’re talking second, third, fourth generation benefits culture. So by mixing with the team, helping her to aspire to something in life, Sam* did well at school, she’s now at college and a real privilege for me was bringing her down to London for the National Prayer Breakfast. She used to be so introverted and timid, but getting her up in front of an audience of Lords and Ladies and her telling her story and seeing them weeping – it was just great. And she sometimes presents at our youth event, so to see her, she’s seventeen years old now, to see her preaching, giving her testimony and leading her friends to Christ is just fantastic. Why I like that story so much is that it illustrates what we’re really, really aiming for long term, which is that we will do ourselves out of a job, that she and her friends will become the hope for their communities. We believe passionately that young people, when they’re centred on Jesus and given an opportunity to express their God-given potential, that they’re going to have a transformational effect.
We did a graduation event on Saturday night for a whole bunch of young people who’ve been through our mentoring programme – we do bronze, silver and gold, which take about six months each, and involves mentoring, volunteering, and an event that they come along to – so we had about a dozen young people graduating through that programme, all from the inner-city, all kids that six to twelve months ago you’d have looked at and said, ‘you what? You can change the world?’ But we do carry this vision, which is the Ezekiel 37 vision, the valley of the dry bones, which is that the raw material is all there, but don’t look up, look down, because it’s all under your feet, it’s broken bones, it’s shattered lives, but through his Spirit God can raise them up, and that’s what we’re seeing, young people all over the city becoming the hope for their community.
Jo: How does what you do relate to the rest of the world? You say you want to make disciples who can affect the rest of the world…
Matt: I would not be doing what I’m doing now, I would not be giving all my energy every day to The Message or Eden, instead of Tearfund if I didn’t see that in time there would be a link between what we’re doing and what you’re doing. I see us as a sending city. Whilst these young people will be the hope for their communities, many of them will become the hope for communities on the other side of the world. We’ll send out people who are passionate about bringing the love of Jesus to communities all over the world. And that doesn’t mean that we’re going to become another missionary agency – I don’t know how it’s going to happen, I just have this feeling in my guts that these young people, as they come through… We’ve got this one girl in Salford, for instance, Jenny, who has five brothers and sisters, brought up in a two bedroom house in Salford – like Victorian conditions, you can’t believe it really. Jesus got a hold of her life through a project with the local youth centre there called the Life Centre, she got introduced to the issue of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa; it just broke her heart, and she made it her goal when she was about thirteen years old, ‘I’m going to do the best I can at school and I’m going to go to University and do nursing and I’m going to go to Africa and work with these kids,’ and she has been absolutely faithful to that vision. First in her family to go to university, she’s studying nursing, she’s got her eyes set on it, she’s going, she’s off! Hopefully she’ll be the first of many.
(*Name changed to protect her identity)