Since 2000, a group of youth and young adults from our church community, led by Matthew Broadbridge, have spent endless hours building relationships and mentoring juvenile offenders at Keelong; demonstrating the love of Christ in very practical ways. As a result of this, in 2007 Keelong asked us to run holiday programs for the detainees. Management at Keelong have attributed and publicly acknowledged that the marked decrease in number and severity of violent incidences as well as the reduction in minor misbehaviour at the centre, was directly attributed to the ministry work of the team over the past 8 years.

The Crime and Violence Prevention Award also recognises the positive approach taken by our church to training adult volunteers supervising Friday night youth group, with trauma sensitive skills and crisis intervention. This training assists our adults to proactively engage youth ‘at-risk’ instead of seeing them as obstructive and in need of removal or reacting to their oppositional behaviour in ways that exacerbates aggression. As a result of this positive approach, significant relationships have been established with youth ‘at-risk’ in the local area who have ventured from hanging around the car park, to wanting to check out ‘what’s happening inside’.

The love our youth and young adults have for Christ, and their desire to live out a life of connecting with and reaching the lost, demonstrates not just to our community, but to our nation that they are a generation who don’t just ‘talk the talk, but walk the walk’.

‘And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Micah 6:8

Photo 2: (left to right) Tony Kelly (Minister for Police), Noreen Hay (State Member for Wollongong) and Matthew Broadbridge