Nickson goes mixin’

Dr Pat Nickson: down with kidz.
[Photo: Dr Pat Nickson/©CMS]

At the age of 60, Pat Nickson finally decided to hit the night clubs.

After more than 30 years as a mission partner in Asia and Africa, she wanted to find out what makes British young people tick.

Pat is now a curate in Wirral in north-west England, and went clubbing as part of her training to be a minister.

Although a world expert on community health, who would fly back from Congo to lecture at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, she found she still had much to learn about modern Britain.

“I really didn't know the culture,” she says.

She had decades of experience of African life as the founder of the pioneering Pan-African Institute of Community Health. So when she was asked to study a different culture as part of her priestly training, she chose Merseyside club culture instead.

“I took advice from some Christian young people about where to go, and then they just abandoned me to the night! ”

In the clubs and on the streets, Pat found teenagers who were far from the stereotypical image of rough louts binge- drinking yobs.

“They didn't make me feel embarrassed - they just talked. And they were interested in what I was doing,” she says.

As Pat got to know them better, the young people explained the names of their different groups - which struck her as quite tribal - and began pouring out the problems they couldn’t tell their parents.

“What was interesting was they’re not so different from me when I was young, or from Congolese kids - they wanted love.

“If you had time to be with them, they shared themselves and wanted to be loved and recognised. There was nothing abnormal about them. They’re looking for spirituality but didn’t know what it really was or where to find it.”

When Pat asked them if they had tried Christianity, many had - but said the church had nothing to offer them.

Pat, on the other hand, was a surprise to them. “You’re pretty broad-minded to be religious,” they would tell her as she listened to their sexual problems. But Pat’s medical background meant nothing could shock her.

This experience of crossing the generation gap got Pat’s brain ticking.

In Africa, many of the heartfelt needs of the children would be met through the support network of the extended family. Her attention turned to the older generation, the grandparents.

“How can we help them to be missionaries to their grandchildren?” she asks.

So now at services and gatherings where older people meet she has begun to encourage them to think what they can do for the younger generation.

And the church’s children’s worker, also a former mission partner (with the South American Mission Society), is coming to the older people's fellowship so they can find out what young people are talking about.

“From a Christian point of view, the only people who can talk about faith to them is their grandparents - they won’t listen to parents.”

Now Pat is looking for more ways the different age-based groups in her church can become a resource for the others, sharing some of the community concern across the generations that has meant so much to Pat in her life in Congo.

“I’m still exploring,” she says. “I suppose I’ve got mission in the blood.”