August is a month of change here. For the last fifteen years, or possibly a bit more, we’ve been living and mainly working on the same old council estate, ‘Nunsthorpe’ in Grimsby, a post industrial town on the east coast of England which was recently rated the ‘toughest place to be a girl’. Our two daughters have grown up here.
All things change and soon, probably during August, we’ll be moving away from Grimsby, and away from Nunsthorpe, the place we’ve called home for a decade and a half. We’ve had four homes in our time here, our favourite one lasted only six months before the landlord kicked us out to put someone else in.
The first home we had here was a flat above an off license - or it was an off license when we moved in, it wasn’t by the time we moved out.
One day I was looking out of the flat window and saw a group of kids practising parkour in the street below - well sort of - they were jumping off railings and bouncing on a bollard. “You should call the police next time you see the little b*****s,” one of my neighbours told me. I didn’t. I went out to chat to them instead.
After getting to know them a bit I ended up setting up a parkour club with them which ran for quite a while. I hired a hall and brought in instructors who were part of a local parkour crew - eventually those instructors ended up setting up their own facility. Many of the kids who went to the club grew in skill and in confidence while it was on - ‘any obstacle can be overcome if you keep trying and adapt your technique’ they learned, and then demonstrated.
“Running that club on Nunsthorpe meant that [the instructors] were able to set up their own place, you opened the door for them,” one of the lads who had been part of the club told me recently - he’s a mechanic now. He still goes to watch the parkour instructors train sometimes, but doesn’t do take part anymore. “I don’t want to get injured,” he said, laughing. “It would stop me playing rugby. Not being big headed or anything, but I’m the star winger.”
Not all of the kids who went to the club ended up as mechanics who play rugby at the weekend, I saw one them get taken away not long back. He’s doing time, now, for offences related to drugs and violence. I saw another one fighting in the street at 3am just last month. Detectives were round doing house to house enquiries a few hours later.
The club got me nominated, though, by the police for an award for ‘reducing crime’ - I told them I didn’t want people to think I was working for the police so I didn’t want the award - but some people thought I was working for the police anyway. “You’ve got a lot of confidence,” a neighbour said, “and you wear those boots.” I looked down at my Dr Martens and sighed.
There have been highlights and low lights living here - probably the lowest point came a few years back when we went through a phase of having our windows put through courtesy of a lad I’d known for years - since he was about five in fact. He was in the same primary school class as one of my kids. By this point he was in his mid teens and his mum, an addict, was very poorly. He was lashing out, and saw me as someone to lash out at - unfortunately that meant my family too. “We call it, ‘child sacrifice’” a friend said to me, once, as we discussed the difficulties of bring kids up in tough places. I still wonder whether we should have done things differently or not.
“We’re going to be living in suburbia…” I said to my wife, as we came away from visiting the new house where we’ll move soon - once it’s ready for us. “I don’t know what that’s going to be like. I have literally never lived in suburbia.” As a child I moved from living in tied farm cottages while my dad was a shepherd, to living on another council estate, while he was a student. By the time all that came to an end I had left home.
Recently, having been for a bit of a walk, I decided to take a shortcut home, jumping a fence and going through from the top corner of our estate back down to our house. I passed road ends which had been sealed off, years ago, so that nobody could get through to the new build housing that lies just south of the Nunsthorpe social housing. The large, steel, plates that block those roads off look like something from Berlin in the 1950s. I had once hoped that we could get rid of them, or at least beautify them - but that’s never happened. The sense of engineered social division and clearly demarcated social hierarchy remains physically present in these sorts of places.
The streets I walked back through that day are still scruffy and the same problems that were here 15 years ago are still here today - despite all the community initiatives that have happened, and believe me when I say I’ve been involved in quite a few. One thing I realised some time ago is that when you help people sort their lives out they often don’t stay around - they move somewhere nicer. Zones of transition are necessary, I realise. So are times of transition.
If I could put my finger on one thing, I think it was actually the smashed windows debacle that helped me decide I wanted to reconnect with congregational church. Despite Christianity forming a key part of my identity since childhood, I’d been a critic of the way that church is modelled in its gathered form, preferring edgier, creative and more ‘outsider’ options. I realised, though, that I was missing the sort of support that being part of a congregation could (ideally) give me when we went through all the difficulties of that time - so eventually I reconnected. When I was wondering what sort of church might provide a home for someone like me - I knew it had to be somewhere that had space for diversity. I found that, to my surprise actually, in the United Reformed Church.
And now, today, (Saturday 3rd of August) I’m being ordained as a minister of word and sacraments in the United Reformed Church, and I’m moving to what I think of, at least, as suburbia - the sort of place I’ve never lived in before. Part of me feels very excited, and part of me is, I don’t know what. “It’s a process within a process,” a wise friend said in a message this week.
We go through times of transition, zones of transition, space and places of change and movement - everything changes, everything is in the process of change. Not all of society’s intractable problems can be solved by an air of unflappable confidence and a pair of Dr Martens, but some kids once showed me how pretty much any obstacle can be overcome if you keep trying, and learn to adapt your technique.
Years ago, back when I was about fourteen, I was sat outside a classroom with a group of mates. Danny was there, and big Gav, Robbie and Scobie. Ian was there too, I think. “What are you going to do when you’re older?” we asked each other. We reckoned that Danny, perhaps the most talented of us, was going to be a musician, he ended up as an artist, although a weakness for narcotics, already developing if only we’d realised it, meant that he never achieved what he might have. We all agreed, too, that Robbie was going to be lumberjack - and we were right. Ian is a musician and DJ now, I see him sometimes and I buy his music when he releases it. I don’t remember too much else from that conversation - except that I remember Scobie declaring that he thought I would become: “an evangelist, like Billy Graham.”
There had been a big Billy Graham rally in Edinburgh around that time, so he was a Christian that everyone had heard of, even in my school. I don’t know what I said to that, perhaps I was flattered, or maybe embarrassed. I don’t imagine Billy Graham would be very impressed with me if he were still alive now - we’re not exactly cut from the same cloth, we don’t share much by way of worldview or theology. But perhaps my vocation has always been sort of clear, in one way or another.
In a way, wherever we go, whatever we do, we take all the things we’ve done, and all the people we’ve known, with us. The process of becoming who we are continues, and we are made up of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Those stories are developed in the interactions, encounters, successes and failures of our lives. Those stories are made up of the people we meet along the way. I am made of the people, and somehow the places, that have been part of my life. And so I guess we’re all going to be a minister now.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
The bigggest of best wishes to you Simon.
You have tremendous courage, in the form of loving curiosity. Do good.
And thanks.
J.
Thinking of you as you begin a new stage of life, and may the people and encounters that have formed you, continue to bless you as new relationships and connections begin.