Staff interview - Jenny Weitzel

Tell me a bit about who you are and what you were doing before you arrived at Cliff College.

I’m a mom, a wife, a friend, a daughter – this is who I really am, not just what I do. I’m from the USA, my husband and I moved here with our three girls over the summer. Back in the States, I was the Director of Children and Family Ministries at a Presbyterian Church (USA) church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in what we called Amish country. My main responsibility was programme development for children and family ministries after the COVID-19 pandemic. I spent the bulk of my time building up children and family engagement through new and old ministry opportunities, which felt very fruitful. Family ministry is so meaningful to me because families today are rather disconnected, so I loved being part of a church that valued and made space for families to connect and grow together. It was also deliberately intergenerational, involving not just kids and parents but grandparents and single people too. And alongside that, I ran a sports programme; we had 200 basketball players from ages 6-10 come in on a weekly basis for practice and games, plus around 50 volunteer coaches and 10-12 paid referees. That was a really fun part of my job and something I’m proud of, especially not being a particularly athletic person myself! 
 

You started at Cliff College this September – tell me about your role and work here.

My role is shared between Cliff College and the Methodist Church – most of my work for Cliff right now is preparing teaching for the CYF pathway on our degree programme and our Foundations: Exploring CYF Ministry unit, which fall into my area of responsibility. The other part of my role is focused on offering support and developing programmes for churches working with 16-18-year-olds. There are lots of great things the local church is already doing, so we want to come alongside them and build on their work, maybe offer some retreats or leadership training; things churches would struggle to sustain on their own but that will be beneficial for the young people in their congregations and communities as they make some key decisions about who they are and what they want to do with their lives. 

How did you start out in ministry with children and young people, and what continues to excite and inspire you about this area of ministry?

It’s always been part of who I am – even as a young person going to church, I was always both participating in ministry opportunities and leading others in various capacities. My husband and I led a young adults group when we were just out of college, and worked at the same church for a while – he worked with children and families, and I worked with the youth group, so that was a fun partnership. 

I think being passionate about working with different generations and encouraging them to engage in spirituality and faith is part of God’s gifting in my life – particularly now that I’ve seen how important it is for my own daughters to have a faith formation experience that’s rooted in a community and isn’t only based on what we offer at home. 

In the years you’ve been working with children and young people, what changes have you seen and how do those changes present both challenges and opportunities to the church? 

I think children now are more in need of attention and affection. We all have a natural inclination to want to connect with others, but that need is sometimes not being fulfilled in children and young people – and maybe in adults too! Our online connectedness and reliance on our devices can thwart our ability to do face-to-face relationships well, and I think the church has an opportunity to be able to support connectedness within families and to remind parents that being present is the most important thing they can do for a child at any age. That reliance on devices is particularly impactful for development and identity; there’s a whole generation of children and young people who don’t know who they are if they don’t have a device in their hand. So much of what we need to offer as a church is to teach people how to be human and see the Christ in each other – how to be in relationship with people, how to look someone in the eye and ask how they are (and be curious to know the answer). I’m not anti-technology by any means, but we need to educate people to be both digitally and socially literate; how to use digital media well and how to connect offline really well too.

I’ve also seen a growing awareness within churches that children and young people desire to have (are fully capable of having) a full experience of God, even if we, as the church, are unsure about how to foster those experiences yet. We know and believe that children are fully human and that those experiences are possible. And that presents a great opportunity, and it also requires the church to be brave and bold in the way it offers those experiences to children, young people, and their families (of all kinds).

There are lots of people in churches who want to engage in working with children, young people and families but don’t know where to start – what would you say to encourage them? 

I would say, focus on people, not programming. The best support we can offer is to be present for people and to be the presence of Christ for others. The activities and events are only as good as the connections that you make with the people who are there – the programming should facilitate the space for connection rather than being the connection itself. Support systems are also really important, especially for those engaged in youthwork – it can be such a lonely ministry. I advocate for youth workers spending time praying and studying and learning together, not just talking about the work they’re doing - as leaders we are so often caught up in trying to lead others towards a relationship with God that we end up neglecting that relationship ourselves. So being connected to and in community with other youth workers is super important. 
 

What’s one thing that’s surprised you about life in the UK so far, and what’s one thing that you would like to import from the USA? 

My thing to import would be coffee creamer! There are a few snacks we’re missing as well, particularly pumpkin-flavoured things around this time of year. 

In terms of surprises, I think I assumed that the public transportation systems would work better than they do! We don’t have a car yet, so getting the girls to school has been interesting. We’ve had to a) learn how the public transportation system is supposed to work, and b) figure out what to do when it doesn’t work! And the other thing is the sheer number of dialects that exist – particularly as we are a College that draws students from all over the UK, there are a lot of different accents and dialects to pick up on and get used to.