Stop your messing around

This has been playing on my mind all weekend.

Friday night at Weekenders and we had virtually everyone there. Some came back after a short layoff. It was supposed to be an exciting night, we were to announce the parts for the forthcoming production. However, we couldn’t. Or rather we weren’t allowed to because some of the little darlings were playing up bad style.

Now we run a fairly relaxed regime on a Friday night, we give the kids some space and, on the whole, they take that and enjoy themselves. They have always mixed well. That is until one of the regulars introduced some of his friends, local lads, who in turn introduced their friends. This was great, we have often worried that it can be a bit cosy at times and it needed a bit more edge to it. And that is what we got and have continued to get for the past couple of months and we have kept it together on the whole. Of course there have been disputes and a bit of ‘them and us’ between the originals and the newbies, but that was to be expected and we held it all together. Until Friday.

The real problem is that the lad who invited the local lads in fell out with them and what started as a bit of needle between him, his brother and these other lads quickly escalated into quite a lot of nastiness and some physical violence.

We had to take some action, the whole evening was being hijacked by a few mouthy types and it was becomeing distressing for quite a few there. So we excluded the troublemakers. It was the obvious thing to do, it was the only thing to do and yet it has troubled me from the moment the decision was taken.

And yet it shouldn’t really. We have always run the club for the kids, they are allowed to make the decisions and they impose their own limits and authority over the thing. That was something we were (and are) proud of, that’s how it worked. These new lads couldn’t cope with that privilege and responsibility.  I am sure that this isn’t their fault etc. and part of me feels rather mean to deny them the chance to experience what is essentially a great place for kids to spend their Friday nights. But they had a lot of chances and blew them all.

Some of them will never get what we do and the way we do it and we won’t see them again. Some, I suspect, will try to come back and we will have to make a call on whether we feel they can step up and join in on the same terms as the rest of the group.

I hope they can.

Want to be starting something…

Someone made a comment on the blog which always makes me feel guilty that I haven’t written anything for ages.

I am going to write something today though, inspired by the many legions of people that search for ‘remember me I’m the one who had your babies eyes’ or ‘get yourself connected’ and end up here.

Weekenders are starting a pantomime on Friday. This is our first real activity since we had the influx of ‘local kids’ in the past few weeks. We have pretty much always been a fairly close-knit sort of group, people came because they knew people at the church or their friends invited them along. Of late this has changed a little with quite a few (we regularly get 25 kids a week there now) locals, who have heard about the club from various places, coming along to see what it is all about. Most of them seem to enjoy it enough to stay.

This is, of course, brilliant. We have probably reached our maximum capacity now and will have to start a waiting list. It has caused some tensions between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ but nothing we can’t handle.

So I will promise here and now to faithfully document what we get up to in the next few months and will extend a warm welcome to all of you to come along and watch our first production in our new home.