Mad for it in Manchester

Andy Hawthorne is 37 years old. He's married to Michelle, and has two children aged seven and four. They all live in Manchester and Andy supports Manchester United FC. He's a member of St. Mary's, a thriving Anglican evangelical church in Cheadle.
All of which is fairly routine. Commonplace. Even mundane. However, there can't be many middle-aged Christians who 'front' a dance band whose albums are distributed by a major recording company, featured on Radio 1, been subject to Joan Bakewell's attention on Everyman, and includes someone who was once the UK Breakdancing champion, and a DJ at Manchester's leading nightclub.
The band is called The World Wide Message Tribe - they are totally committed to Jesus, and are remarkable, primarily, in the unbridled passion they have in reaching young people with the uncompromising message of salvation through Christ alone.
Steve Timmis recently interviewed Andy in Manchester.

ST: Tell us something about the WWMT.

AH: The WWMT is part of The Message to Schools Trust, which is trying to reach young people in the Manchester area with the gospel. The WWMT are a group of itinerant evangelists and Bible teachers, and dance music is really just our platform because it's the music of the kids. It's the means by which we earn the right to preach the gospel to them. So if we don't spend more time teaching the Bible than we do jumping up and down, rapping and singing, then we've lost the plot as far as I'm concerned, because that's our thing.
I know that if I put a sign outside my church saying 'Bible Study tonight', then I'd get no kids, certainly no non-Christian kids. But if I put a sign outside saying 'World Wide Message Tribe In Concert', I can get 5,000 kids turning out in Manchester, and 500 of them showing a real interest in what we tell them about Jesus.

United on Manchester City

ST: Manchester seems to be very prominent in your ministry.

AH: Yes. Manchester is our thing, and we're committed to spending ten months of the year in the city in the schools. The only reason we do stuff outside Manchester is if it promotes the ministry to schools in their city, and if it fires up people to do something similar in their patch. That doesn't mean that we think that God likes Manchester people more than anyone else, but it's just our thing. It's what God has called us to.

ST: But what about your success in other countries?

AH: We've sold in excess of 150,000 albums which isn't bad for a Noddy schools outfit. And we're often asked to do tours abroad. Last year, for example, we slightly lost the way and we went off to the USA, but it meant that we had two or three months away from the schools over the summer. It's really easy to start getting your head turned if you spend a month on a tour bus, being taken from flash hotel to flash hotel, wheeled in front of 20,000 Christians at a time. You can see why so many bands lose it. Especially in the States, you can live the life of a pop star just by being in the Christian subculture, and there's plenty of people doing that. So you start to think about the money you'll raise, how you can make an impact on the other bands, but that's not for us. Our thing is Manchester!

Fruit from Eden

ST: The WWMT is also actively promoting something called The Eden Project. Could you tell us about that?

AH: One of the things we've noticed is that our missions work really well in the suburbs of Manchester, for the simple reason that most of the Christians live in the suburbs. So it's obvious that it's going to work well in those areas 'cos you've got the youth leaders, lively churches, money and people who care about the kids. By contrast, the urban areas have only 20% of Christians living alongside the people, and there isn't the back-up, so when we did a mission in one of the inner-city areas we'd see loads of kids respond, but what would happen to them then?
The mission that really swung it for us was one we did in Wythenshaw, where we did a concert at the end of two school weeks. 700 kids came to the concert an d 100 of them professed some kind of faith. Many of them had a real encounter with God, so much so that they all turned up at a little local church of 25 people the following Sunday.
That Sunday they had 125 people, with these few old ladies up front wondering what's going on, and all these Wythenshaw nutters who'd met God!
That was two years ago and now there's only five of those kids still going on. Not because the other 95 weren't up to it but because the church couldn't cope. It's hard to cope with five who come into the kingdom with so much baggage and so many problems. They're like premature babies, these kids. They come in. God has saved them and they're born again but actually they need intensive care. They need sticking in an incubator for a few months and having one-on-one 24-hour care.
By the end we realised that it was just not working, and all the members of The Tribe were desperate to get back into Wythenshaw, every time we had a spare five minutes, and to go into the schools and see these kids who wanted to know why the church couldn't cope with them. So we really felt we had to start something.
The first thing we thought about was planting a youth church, but I was unhappy about that because of the pastoral implications and the amount of time it would take. There are local churches in Wythenshaw so we had this idea of trying wherever possible to find a church that was flexible enough. We wouldn't argue about points of doctrine, we would just see if the people were passionate for Jesus and passionate for kids, and prepared to follow them up. If we found a church like that we'd say to them 'We're willing to take on your youth work, which means that we're going to give you 50 youth workers and put in £30,000-worth of gear into your church - video, lights, PA. A full-time team will move in to be part of your congregation. All you've got to do is pastor and care for them, and be flexible enough to change and make sure that your people will be helping them.' The first one is up and running.

ST: How long has it been going?

AH: Since last September. People started moving in about 18 months ago, but it was a year of slowly moving people in. We're not seeing full-blown revival but bit-by-bit it's happening. There are now about 150 kids going to Christian groups in the schools, about 30 kids going through discipleship groups, and maybe 20 or so at church on a Sunday morning. We've had the first few baptised, and it's just smart what God's doing. The really exciting thing is that on the back of all this the church is growing. The church is rising and God's working.

ST: How many people have shown an interest in joining the Project?

AH: We've had hundreds of people applying and we've gone through this rigorous selection procedure where they have to have all these references, interviews, visit Wythenshaw and make sure it's God's call for them. They then have a final interview and if it all goes well all the way through (the whole process takes about four to five months) then we say to them, 'Here's the good news: you can move into a slum and not be paid for it!'.

ST: For how long do people have to 'sign up'?

AH: There's no specific time stipulated, but we're not interested in people taking a year out. More of taking a life out. We need people to go in and be salt and light, live it and make a difference in the place where the need is. We've had about 200 young people apply from Soul Survivor, and they're just the kind of people we want. A bit older than the kind of kids we're trying to reach, but just at that age, coming out of university or just starting to think about a career, and they have to make that decision - what am I going to do with my life? Am I just going to get on that upwardly mobile treadmill, which is more and more for me? Or am I going to start putting some Kingdom values in place? Making God's Kingdom a priority?

What it takes

ST: Tell us again what your criteria is in working with churches in these inner-city areas?

AH: I'm determined to work with anybody who loves Jesus and to the best of their ability are trying to follow him. Now that's not the sort of criteria you usually associate with evangelical churches, and that's part of our current problem. We've got to start forgetting about our differences and getting on with the things we agree on, which is the important stuff - winning the world for Jesus. I go to a conservative evangelical church, so I'm not standing on the outside throwing bricks, but we can be the world's worst.
We say we're into evangelism and the Word and all that, but we can be the world's worst for contemplating our navels, messing about while the world burns. It's just tragic. We're supposed to be the people who are into the right stuff. We're supposed to be the evangelicals, but we don't live like it, and we can be incredibly arrogant. God's doing all this fantastic stuff and we think we have a divine right to knowledge and revelation.

ST: It all seems fairly demanding and frenetic, so what keeps you going?

AH: For a start, we're convinced that we've got some incredible promises from God. Promise from different parts of Isaiah about rivers in the desert and streams in the wasteland. Tough places with wild animals.
And we've just got a calling and a passion for young people. That's the problem the church has got to face up to. If we could hold on to our teenagers we'd be growing, but we're not holding on to them. In the 1980s we lost half our teenagers and it's not getting any better. So we're trying to say: 'Look! Let's go to the heart of the problem. Let's go to the teenagers and let's go to the worst teenagers, inner-city teenagers and tell them about Jesus.'

Steve Timmis leads The Crowded House church in Sheffield.

An interview with Andy Hawthorne of The World Wide Message Tribe about evangelistic outreach among teenagers in Manchester

ST: Tell us something about the WWMT.

United on Manchester City

Fruit from Eden

ST: How long has it been going?

What it takes

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