The Bishop of Lichfield has called on the Church of England to “heal” its relationships with young people in his Presidential Address to members of the Lichfield Diocesan Synod who met over the weekend.

|TOP|The Rt Rev. Jonathan Gledhill told members of the Synod to “heal our relationships with the young people of our parishes and challenge them to something more exciting than getting legless on a Friday night and then damaging the environment”.

He also asked them to imagine what would happen if the church could harness the “latent skills and energies” of young people and turn them into church and community leaders.

Rev. Gledhill said: “One way of looking at the tough places is to see them as kind of barren places where there’s no leadership at all.” He referred to the numerous town councillors and police who regard the marginalised communities in the dioceses as “dens of vice”.

“But what I hear from those who live in these places – including the clergy – is really quite a different thing. They often see their neighbourhoods as places of remarkable resourcefulness; of people who are used to overcoming the kind of adversity that most of us have never had to.”

The Bishop of Lichfield also referred to the numerous cynics in the Bible who asked whether anything good could come out of Nazareth, saying that “God actually carves out his living stones in the local quarry”.

|QUOTE|“The trick that I have seen many of our churches are learning, in new kind of ways appropriate to a new century, is how the love of God enables the local quarry to be opened up and new living stones to be hewn out – how to grow a whole new generation of community leaders from people who’ve not had much chance to run things.

“People who in the past have been the clients of the expert social workers we have sent amongst them, or the clients of the expert theologians,” he said.

According to Rev. Gledhill, the people of the local communities are keen to befriend the many youths in their area: “Everyone wants to do something, if they can, to give them spiritual foundations in an uncertain world.”

He concluded his speech by challenging members of the Synod to harness the “latent skills and energies” of young people in order to prevent them from committing acts of violence to other people or to the local area and to provide the challenge for youths to overcome their boredom with their lives.