Hello
I’m Andrew Georgiou, a chaplain at His Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution in Wetherby, West Yorkshire and appointed back in March 2007. I took up my role after much prayer and consternation about a change in direction after many years in local Church ministry. What I had failed to realise when I applied and got the job, was that my role would be working with 15–18-year-old males!
It wasn’t too long before the Lord brought back to my memory a tearful prayer that I had made back in 1992 when I asked the Lord to help me reach young people, this was an area of ministry that I had always struggled in. That evening as I walked through the chapel, the tears came again but this time with thankfulness that God had answered my prayer, albeit in a way I had not expected.
Ministry in a YOI brings many challenges, in the last year or two, these challenges have increased by the addition of young ladies to our establishment. Self-harm was always an issue but, in some ways, has risen to a new level with the complexity that most of our young people have experienced in their lives. Whilst we have struggled to recover numbers in attendance at our Sunday worship post-covid, we are slowly rebuilding, and I regularly enjoy the support of some wonderful church volunteers who love to come and support me in the services I conduct and in the mid-week groups I run. The groups include Youth Alpha, Four Points Course and more. One of the courses I am a facilitator of is Time Out for Dads. This is a parenting course for young dads and is a Care for the Family Course. It is hard to understand at times how some of our young men can learn how to parent when they have not really had any positive parenting themselves, but it is a joy at the end of the course, when possible, to see them holding their babies in the end of course celebration.
I think that one of the most satisfying achievements I have made over the years, is the establishment of a charity of which I am the co-founder and a trustee. This amazing charity is called In2Out, a registered charity that aims to reduce reoffending among young people aged 15-21 through our mentoring and resettlement process. Our foundations are firmly based on the Christian Faith, and this is the motivation of most of our staff. You can look at our website for more information about this, https://www.in2out.org.uk/about-us .
I never imagined that God would answer my prayers by putting me inside a custodial setting, over the years many young people have made a response to the Gospel in our services and groups. As a chaplain, to my fellow chaplains, we can never be sure about the progress of the seed sown in our ministries in prisons, but we must never give up believing that one day the seed sown will produce good fruit in the lives of those we have the privilege and joy to minister too.
I love the opportunities which being a chaplain bring to me, I am able to serve as a small part of the Prisons Week Working Group, a facilitator on the Welcome Directory courses for those considering becoming Welcome Directory members and also as the Assemblies of God Lead for Prisons.
In the juvenile estate, no day is ever the same, you feel that you are working with an age group that are still open to change. Their broken lives can make you cry but their openness to soak up a message of hope for their future is a massive encouragement to press on.