I’m going back to a personal memory for this week’s reflection, and I think it’s a pretty special one. For several years, from the early to mid nineties, I can guarantee you’d know where to find me of a Sunday evening, and that was at FT, the youth group at New Malden Baptist Church.

What “FT” stood for was always bit of a running joke. Officially, supposedly, it stood for “Fourteen To Twenty”, the age range for the group, but unofficially it stood for anything you wanted it to, such as “Felt Tired”, “Festering Tea Towels”, “Fat Toads” or “Far Too Few Telephones”, all of which appeared on the groups’ notice board from time to time. The group met twice a week, at the church. On Fridays, there was a youth-club style evening of games, music, craft activities etc. There would usually be something organised, but mostly people hung out with each other and did what they wanted. The focus was social, and it was usually really good fun. On Sunday evenings, there was a meeting after the evening service, and the focus of this was a bit more serious – it was a “fellowship meeting”, so was about teaching, worship and prayer. Sometimes we’d have a talk and discussion, other times we’d pray for various things, sometimes someone would come in from outside and lead something, but the focus was always on our faith. Out of the two meetings each week, back in the day I always preferred this one.

I can distinctly remember the very first time I went – it was Sunday 4th March 1990, and it was at the end of the eventful week that saw me decide to become a Christian. Group meetings took place in the church coffee lounge, a cosy upstairs room with benches around the sides, and on that particular day it was very full in there. It was the end of a week of outreach events, and I’d gone along with a schoolfriend, somewhat unsure of what to expect, and feeling quite nervous. I remember the meeting starting off with everyone talking about how they felt about the week of mission events the church had just hosted. The thing that really sticks out in my memory over 30 years later was how passionate and serious the things people said were. At the time, I was a pretty serious-minded kid, and I hated how trivial a lot of things seemed to be. I wanted to discuss big issues and get my mind around difficult questions, but most of my friends didn’t give a toss about any of this, and it was genuinely frustrating. Here it seemed like I might have found my tribe.

It soon became clear that I was part of something pretty special. Most churches, if they have enough young people in them, will run youth groups, but they’re a mixed bag, really – sometimes there’s not enough kids to put on anything particularly special, sometimes there isn’t much interest or commitment, and sometimes it’s all kept a bit apart from the life of the church as a whole. None of these accusations could be levelled at FT. It was a big group of motivated kids, and we were given loads of activities to jump into and get a lot out of. The leaders were mostly quite young themselves, and put a lot of effort and energy into things. This really impresses me now – it took a while for me to realise just how hard they worked, and how seriously they took it all. It wasn’t just two nights a week – these people were pretty much on-call all the time. Teenagers being what they are, we’d all have problems and difficulties now and again, and the leaders really did step up to the plate and look out for us. Members of the group would randomly show up on their doorsteps in the middle of a crisis, and they’d get phone calls from us whenever we were upset about things, and they’d help us out and care for us. It was really amazing, actually, and I’m hugely grateful for it. We also weren’t invisible – most of us went to church services, and we were included on a regular basis. Sometimes we’d lead worship, sometimes we’d pray or do the Bible readings, but we were always considered an important part of the church family. Young people are often patronised, marginalised or treated like they don’t matter, and that never happened here.

I think the main reason I loved the group so much was because I found it easy to be a big part of it – I became one of the highly committed core of members that would always be there, one of the “in-crowd”, and this was just about the only place in my life where that happened. I never found fitting in very easy, and was awkward as hell in most environments – largely down to undiagnosed autism, I think – but here, I was made to feel like I was a valued and appreciated part of the group. I made lots of friends, of the sort I wanted, who wanted to talk about the big stuff and make a difference to the world. Most importantly, a lot of them were actually girls. I hated the all-boys school I went to – I didn’t feel safe in it, the competitive atmosphere was horrible, and I really didn’t fit in at all. Before long, the majority of my close friends were women, and that’s been true ever since.

As well as the Friday and Sunday meetings, we had a couple of weekends away, at Christian conference centres like Annan Court and Carroty Wood. These would be full of both Friday and Sunday style activities, and would be highly memorable, if somewhat sleep-deprived. No, actually, they were VERY sleep-deprived. On a couple of occasions, we’d all trek off to various leaders and/or former members’ weddings, and I seem to remember not much sleep happening there either.

People came and went, but for most of the time I was part of the group, there were lots of familiar faces, and some of them are still friends to this day, which is pretty awesome. The abiding memory I have is of a lot of us taking life VERY seriously, be that related to our faith, or to our studies. I was used to being in a high-achieving environment as I went to a grammar school, but this was a group of people almost universally toiling away very hard, fully expecting to land top GCSE and A-level grades and get into good universities. This stuff was taken deathly seriously, and getting a B when an A was needed was considered a major tragedy (even if it was God’s will). Many of the group’s members have gone on to quite high-powered careers. I always struggled a bit with this, as I had a serious motivation problem at school and didn’t enjoy most subjects. I left school with a pretty good crop of GCSEs, but I messed up my A-levels for the simple reason that I spent too much time at church and prayer meetings! Not exactly sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, but it’s the truth.

This, I think, is the one major downside of it all, and the one regret I have – I think it encouraged all of us to take certain things far too seriously, and I’ve recognised later on the big problems this caused. A successful life is about balance, and a good mix of ideas and activities, and looking back, this was all very skewed. We weren’t ever really allowed to try new things, to be typical teenagers who mess up occasionally, or to step outside the boundaries our faith set for us. It felt like there was almost bit of a holiness pissing contest going on, where we were all trying to outdo each other in how full-on-for-the-Lord we were, and it now shocks and saddens me that I spent so much of my youthful energy on that – I’m never getting those days back again.

I ended up going to a bunch of prayer meetings where “gifts of the Spirit” were invoked, and going to a big charismatic youth event, and that led on to my year out, which was a disaster on a pretty epic scale in terms of how my life panned out. Sigh. I think if I could go back in time and have serious words with my younger self, I’d boot him pretty hard and tell him to lighten up and get laid.

Because most people in the group ended up going to university at 18 or 19, that’s when they ended up leaving, but I was there for a couple of years longer, as I didn’t go to uni until I was 22. I felt too old by then, but there wasn’t really anywhere else to go. There was a group for twenties and thirties, but most people in it were at least 25, most somewhat older, and although I knew some of them, I felt like a complete outsider and didn’t persist with it.

Anyway, we all eventually went our separate ways, but I kept in touch with a lot of people, at least for a while. It all gradually wore off a bit, of course, as life panned out differently for us all. Through the “wonders” of Facebook, we had a reunion in 2014. About twenty of us showed up, from various places (I travelled the furthest), and it was the first time I’d seen most of them in twenty years. It was a strange experience. My life wasn’t great at the time – I’d had a lot of personal setbacks, and felt like I had nothing to say to people who were all pretty successful. My faith was also falling apart at the time (I stopped going to church about a year later). One former group member who showed up is now a big name in the world of Christian publishing, and managed to completely rub me up the wrong way with a very self-congratulatory blog post he made about the reunion afterwards, but generally it was interesting to find that probably half the people who showed up had some serious doubts about the form of Christianity we were taught. We were happy to celebrate the good, though, and I think there was indeed quite a lot of that, despite some of the problems and hassles a lot of us have had since.

Whatever way you look at it, those Sunday evenings in the coffee lounge were big formative experiences for me, and the effects of them – both good and bad – will be felt for the rest of my life.