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15 HammondsSupplement to Issue No. 15, March 22,
2006
Issue No. 15 main article | Research
Review index | Emmanuel Gospel Center
Wisdom for Urban Youth Ministry
Youth Ministry Summit, Boston, February 3, 2006
an interview with Ray Hammond and Gloria White-HammondThe following is a transcript of an interview with Ray Hammond and Gloria White-Hammond conducted by Brian Corcoran, managing editor of the Emmanuel Research Review. The Hammonds had been invited to participate in a Youth Ministry Summit on February 3, 2006, but at the last minute were unable to attend. Later, Brian caught up with them and recorded their responses to the question, “What have you learned from your years in youth ministry that you’d like to pass on to younger youth workers.”
BC: Pastor Ray Hammond, thank you for talking with us today. We would like to ask you, what lessons or wisdom you would have shared if you were able to attend The Boston Youth Summit?
RH: Two things that stand out, because I’m sure that [the other] people [speaking] touched on a lot of the issues I’d love to second, and reiterate, and give my own stories about. Maybe two that I would like to highlight are the youth minister as a reconciler/bridge builder, and the youth minister as a model.
And in the first instance, one of the big challenges that I find is, often in youth ministry we don’t have as critical a sense of the responsibility we have to minister to adults. And the fact we really can, and have to serve, a really critical role in bridging what is often, quite frankly, a developmental gap that is on one level normal, but that’s also dangerous if it is not, in effect, ministered to. That’s a period when young people are trying to develop their own identity, which they must, trying to develop their own sense of faith, which they have to, but it’s also a time when they need to be able to do that in the context of a whole series of other relationships around them, including family and other adults in the community around them. Typically, there are not a lot of people who can help to keep those [relational] ties there. And I think it is one of the most important things that youth ministers can do. And unfortunately, because of the pressure of time, and programs that they have to do, or sometimes feeling marginalized themselves, they end up not doing it [bridging those relational ties].
We are in the process of circulating this job description [in which] we said, we need this youth pastor to be as involved in teaching parents how to understand and connect with your own kids as they do in talking with young people themselves. We need to have them help young people understand how to understand your parents and where they are coming from, and operating under, and that sort of thing. We need them to ministering to the whole church and understanding the fact that youth ministry is not an adjunct, or an add on, or a holding pen until people grow up and mature and then can make a contribution to the Kingdom of God. But that it is at the very heart of what the church has to be about. And this is the kind of ambassadorial role, bridge-building role, reconciling role that I think youth ministers can and have to do.
And we learned, [while working] with “at risk” kids, that it’s great for us to minister to the kids, but, if I can’t speak to the judge who’s going to determine their sentence, if I can’t talk to the teacher who may make a difference in whether they are expelled and they get another opportunity, if I can’t help their parents to know how to help them, if I can’t speak to the local business person who may want to be willing to take a chance on giving the kid a job, [then] I haven’t done that kid a whole lot of favor, in giving them the kind of help they need.
So that’s one [way] I would really encourage people to see themselves. An ancillary benefit from that, I think, is that more youth ministry would get more support: volunteer support, financial support, and involvement in the life and the ministry of the church, rather than, unfortunately, as it is sometimes as being, pushed to the margin. So, that’s one thing I would really commend to people.
And the second piece is that issue of modeling. One of the reasons that balance, you know, we talk about balance, balance is critical not only because you don’t want to burn out, and end up doing youth ministry because you have to, not because you want to. But, you want to begin to lay out for kids, who may not be seeing it at home. I mean, their parents may still be trying to figure out what balance looks like. And somewhere in their life they need to see somebody, who by God’s grace, has kind of figured out how I maintain that relationship with God that I need to, I minister to my family as I ought to, and I still have an impact on the larger world for the Kingdom of God. They need to see that, because again, they may not be seeing it at home, for all kinds of reasons. So, that model is very, very important. And then of course, all these other qualities in terms of integrity, and honesty, and transparency, and vulnerability—all those things are also so important to model, if they are going to get some examples of what it means to live a healthy Christian life.
BC: Aside from the specifics of youth ministry, could you share any other more general, foundational insights, significant lessons, or principles learned in the course of your ministry?
RH: Yes. Remembering that this is God’s ministry through me, not my ministry for God. It took me along time. I’m not sure I get it every day, but I’m getting it more days than I used to! I think [this] becomes really critical, so that, you know, it isn’t my job to meet every need, to fix every problem, to respond to every crisis. I’m not physically, emotionally, or spiritually capable of doing it. And in fact, I would be out of God’s will if I tried to. So that my biggest challenge is figuring out: what am I called to do today. And when I do that, go to sleep, wake up the next day, and you know…
I think in the beginning, we are often driven by our own need to be faithful, our own need to prove that we can be counted on, or our own need to be significant and to have an impact, and to be loved and respected. And that’s all very normal and very natural. [However], I’m not sure how spiritual it is. So, I’ve got to be honest about what’s really my own needs versus, you know, God’s requirement. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges in sorting it out and being honest about it. I did that really because I needed… that. [Admitting], I’m not sure God said I needed to do that. [Admitting], I needed to do that. And the more that I can be honest about it, I think the better and more effective I become.
There [was] the most wonderful story I heard about Hudson Taylor, I believe it was Hudson Taylor and The Inland China Mission. He was involved in two villages, one which was quite a distance away and one he lived in. And after about a year he realized that the one that he wasn’t in was actually doing spiritually better than the village he lived in. And he was honest enough to ask God why this was true. And God said, “Because, for the place you are not in, you pray more and depend on me more. For the place you live in, you try to get it done yourself.” And so, he came to realize there was an ironic, almost—I don’t know quite what the right word is—a kind of a reversal, in a way [about] knowing when to really step back and commit some things to prayer and just allow God to do what only God can do with it. This was really crucial. And again, I think once we can begin to do that, the possibilities for living that kind of balanced life that God calls us to becomes much better and much more real.
BC: Thank you again, Pastor Ray Hammond.
Gloria White-Hammond: listen | bio
[Rev. Dr. White-Hammond tells the story of the start of a youth program she founded called Do the Write Thing, how it got started, and some of the lessons she learned along the way.]
BC: I would like to start by saying thank you for letting us have this conversation today and to let you know that you were missed at the recent Boston Youth Summit. And I would like to ask if you could just share with us today some of the wisdom you would have shared if you were able to be present the night of Boston Youth Summit.
GH: Well I’m a physician as well as a minister. I’m a pediatrician. So in a sense, I minister to youth and families. I not only get paid to do that as a pediatrician, I get rewarded in other ways as a minister. So lessons learned along the way, and I’ll just kind of randomly think about this.
One of the key lessons I have learned is the importance of just showing up. In 1994, even before that, I hope I can do this succinctly, you can do it succinctly, I was practicing—I have been doing medicine for almost 25 years now, and in about 1992-93, I was really in a crisis mode. Because, I had gone into medicine and that was going to be my vehicle to change the world, and to make the world a better place, and all of that.
I practiced in the South End with patients who largely, at that point, were welfare dependant. And so, I was taking care of families who so often suffered the brunt of the injustices in this system. And while many of them did well and still do well, a few don’t. And obviously in ministry, we operate on the premise that a few lost kids is a few too many.
At that point, about 65-70% of the OB practice, the obstetrics practice at the clinic, were young girls under the age of 18. Most of them would not finish school. And by then, I had been practicing for 15 years. I started to see some of my boys doing the juvenile detention system and getting into trouble, and becoming drug dealers and drug addicts. I was at a real low point in the practice. I was depressed about how little difference I was making. And it’s one thing to be depressed, but I was also depressing. So if you sort of asked me how it was going, I sort of got going on this whole laundry list of how difficult it was, and how the kids that weren’t doing this, and the families that weren’t doing that.
And I had one kid that really shook me. He was a kid who had come from a troubled family. His father was away wherever they go when they drop out of their kids’ lives. His mother had Lupus and even though she was a youngish woman in her mid-thirties, she had a severe case of Lupus. She was oxygen dependant at that young age. But he was a bright kid who was always in trouble, and the school could never figure out how to address his needs.
We would go to meeting after meeting with the school department and even though you would know what he needed, the way the school department worked is you would have to go to the next level, and try that out for a year, and if that didn’t work you would have to go to the next level, when it was so obvious that what he really needed was a residential placement. He just needed a totally restricted environment. But we had to go through all of these stages.
And after years of not being served, he was placed in a facility in a New Hampshire, residential. I then lost track of him and his mother for several years, eventually I heard that his mother had died of Lupus and that this boy, Sean, was in jail. Who knew why, right? They are never guilty when they are in jail.
One afternoon, it was probably in August of 1993, late on a Friday afternoon, I went in to see my last patient who was Sean. Obviously, that’s a really unusual thing for a kid, a black [male] teenage kid to come to see a female pediatrician. He was there obviously because there was a connection.And we did talk about his mother dying. He had been in jail for several years, and we talked about the whole notion of the cloud of witnesses, and when people die their spirits are still with us to cheer us on, encourage us to do our best. And he agreed that his mother was in this cloud of witnesses.
After I examined him, I then went on to talk about blood work; quite frankly I was interested in doing an HIV test. He said he could not stay, and the reason he could not stay was because that day was his eighteenth birthday and he had come to spend it with us. And he was going to celebrate, and he promised he would come back another day, and he didn’t.
Sunday night he was killed. He was shot while riding his bicycle down Mass Avenue. It was one of those drug deals gone bad, kind of thing. And that was so discouraging. Again, I had already had had enough bad experiences. And that just seemed like the worst. Here’s a kid that I had worked with for years. And now he was dead. And there was just another sense of, “Girl, you just can’t get this thing together. You're failing at this, you’ve got to figure out something else.” As I was lamenting it, I just had this sense that Sean had joined my cloud of witnesses. And he was saying, “Get up and do something, and do something different and stop whining and complaining about it.”
And that was a real pivotal point for me. So, in January of 1994, a few months later, I started this wonderful ministry that I love, called, “Do the Write Thing", spelled w-r-i-t-e. We started with 6 girls in the conference room upstairs. The idea was to use writing as a vehicle to express themselves. We were just going to meet on Mondays. We would just go and pick them up and bring them here and we would write. They would have some way of talking about life. We would read literature from black women and then respond to it. They were writers, but their skills were not great, so we needed to figure out ways to get them to express themselves without relying on sentence structure, and agreement, and all-of-that sort of stuff. And we were able to figure it out.
But one of the things, a few of the things that I learned, in that we started out with the plan to do the writing. But then over a period of time, gradually, [we] found overselves insinuating ourselves into more and more aspects of their lives: knowing their families, knowing their neighborhoods, knowing the Store-24 where they would hang out when they skipped school, meeting boyfriends—and discovering that so much of it was… Well, all of those girls eventually finished school. We went through things. We went through shootings and stabbings. We went through babies. We went through dropping out and GED’s. We went through Job Corps. But eventually, they got it together.
And so many lessons I learned from them. One is the importance of staying with kids, and so much of it is riding the waves. You’d like to think that you just share, pour your heart out, and they would get it and they would just go the straight and narrow, and there you go. But it often doesn’t happen like that. And just like God never throws up his hands and says. “I’m sick and tired of y'all, I’m outta here!” A lot of staying with kids through this adolescent time is just riding the waves. And again, insinuating yourself into as many different areas of their lives as possible.
Their mothers would give us permission to do that because we obviously were not looking at ways to replace their mothers. And it was important to understand that it was our role was really to support their mothers. Many of those girls have gone on and stayed with their mothers. But in many ways their mothers also didn’t understand what their lives were like. They just didn’t get what their lives were like, and so they would just often hand their girls over to us and say, “Do something,” and we would be the one that would go to the school meetings and...
I learned how the church can be so wonderful in their lives when the church really does function as a village. I remember we had one mother—I had this elaborate scheme that, I was going to, I was working on—I was in seminary at the time and I was working on mother-daughter relationships, and was going to compare the responses of the mothers to the responses of the girls, once we had read some of the same pieces of literature and how would the mothers write versus the girls. And I went to one mother’s house. I had all my stuff together, it was a grandmother who had taken her granddaughter, grandchild in, and said, “I want you to read this and tell me,” and she couldn’t read. I just assumed she could read, she couldn’t read. But what was so wonderful was that we had a woman in our congregation who was an English teacher at the Timilty Middle School who started working with the woman to help her read. And her dream was to be able to read the Bible.
One family, when they had some landlord stuff, tenant stuff, we had a lawyer in the congregation who went forth and negotiated. And so it was the church being the village. And that, for those young people, was their only exposure to the church.
I learned about the importance of male—of healthy male interaction. What would make these girls so proud was when my husband would sit in the group occasionally and listen to their readings. And, oh my God, it was like, so affirming for them. And what you discovered is that they were so desperate to have a male affirm them in a non-sexual way, not simply because they are sexual beings, but because they were whole young women. You take those things for granted and it meant so much to them.
I learned the importance of—that it wasn’t so much the writing that made the difference for them it was really the relationship. We could have had a group that did basket weaving, or picking your teeth, or something. It was not the activity so much as it was the relationship. It was interesting for me because, one of the reasons I began this thing was because I had this sense in my practice, that the generation of girls are just seeing some disturbing trends. I had felt as though my generation of women have not done well necessarily with this next generation, and I say it in a generic sense. I mean obviously you want to think you’ve done well with your own children. But for a lot of this generation we call troubled, I do not think we have done so well and I think part of, some of it are theories.
When I was coming along, I didn’t have a good model and so part of my job, I saw, was to become a role model. And what I discovered is that, yeah, they need role models, but even more than role models, they need relationships. And it’s the role model can create a possibility of what you can be, but it’s the relationship that is the bridge between the potential and the reality.
The importance of group mentoring— again, in our “Do the Write Thing", we would do it as groups. And that, I realized, was important in that, so often their needs are so intense, there’s just so much stuff, there’s just so many things that you have to think about. And sometimes you can get weary in well doing. And when I get like, “I feel like life is too short to be bothered with this,” then somebody else can say, “You know, I got it covered,” then one is less inclined to experience a burn out.
I also learned about the extent to which this gospel, which we take for granted, you know, we in our own testimonies, how it just transforms us, and all of this stuff, but we’re not. I think we have become so shy about sharing it. And not for nothing, right? I mean, there’s the separation of church and state, and all of that stuff. And when we first started, we were careful not to do that. Now obviously, they are coming to a church, and we are church people, and they are riding around in a van that says Bethel AME Church. They know what we do on Sundays, but we didn’t want to impose ourselves. We did this for about a year, and there was one session where we read from the book of the play for colored women who considered suicide when the rainbow isn’t enough. They are these different vignettes, the orange women, the red women, with different life experiences. So we read the red woman, which is basically a domestic violence story. The man and the woman are in a tussle, and I think the woman has the child and somehow they get to the window, and the child falls out the window and dies, and they have go to respond to it.
And we were actually being taped, because BET was doing a story on us. It was so poignant. One girl could not write, she could just cry. One girl could write, but she couldn’t read. Because for some of us, that story was not just a story. Some of us had lived variations of that thing, some kind of sexual abuse, domestic violence. It was such a challenging moment, you know the cameras are rolling, and it’s like, “let’s pray.” It was the only thing I knew to do. And it was so liberating for those girls, such that, from there on out, that was something they wanted to do. They wanted to pray. They wanted to start doing scripture. I remember one girl, her favorite scripture was Jeremiah 29:11, “I know the plan I have for you, plans to prosper you, not to harm you…,” and she recited it all the way to court. I don’t remember what she was arrested for, but that was her scripture that got her through court, okay.
And what I realized was that with all of the stuff we have to give them, the relationships, the access. I remember the first time when they went to a real restaurant where you didn’t have to stand at a counter and ask for a number 22. The most amazing thing we had to give them was ourselves as available to be in relationship with them, and a life that reflected a relationship with Christ. And I think most of the world is, they are just waiting. You didn’t have to recite John 3:16 to be a member of this club, but just tell it.
Then the importance of having good relationships. You know Ray and I, obviously, we do this thing together. And it’s really, really, really important, because most have never seen a relationship that works. They’ve never seen it up close. They’ve never seen it from afar. It’s a “Hollywood” kind of thing and “Hollywood” relationships, they be falling apart all the time, right? And we can’t say that our…, neither of our parents’ relationships were ones that we would want to model, but we have worked really hard at ours. It hasn’t always been perfect, because we each married imperfect people, but we have worked at it. That’s the first level at which you have to work, is to be whole as a couple. You can do so much more for other people when you are whole as a couple, whole as a family yourself.
Issue No. 15 main article | Research Review index | Emmanuel Gospel Center
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