What about the “gap year”?

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that these days “one in four school leavers decide to defer university for a year” in favour of a gap year. Sometimes, kids just need to mess around for a while before they go to university.

A gap year is a year off from the intensity of study and structured learning. It usually involves some combination of work, travel and time spent with friends. Over the last 10 years, Christian organisations have tried to reach into this space.

There are several Christian gap year options, each providing a year of semi-structured learning about God, the world and the Bible. There are also countless overseas mission options that offer young people a chance to travel and engage in some form of Christian ministry.

Andrew Nixon, outgoing director of Year 13 says the aim of their programme is “to get people established in their Christian faith, and established in church for the long term. It’s genuinely discipleship for all Christians. It’s a one year [programme] which intends to send people out to do whatever they were intending to do before”.

Because it’s about discipleship, learning and growing in Christian community, a Christian gap year might be an excellent decision for a young Christian who intends to go on to study and enter the workforce. A year in such an intentional space could have a profound impact on their faith.

But a Christian gap year is not the only option for a Christian who wants to take a break between school and whatever comes next.

Megan Errington, currently a student at Sydney Missionary and Bible College took a gap year after school. She went with Rotary International to France and did her final year of high school again. Although this time, there were no exams.

“I lived with four different families that year, but none of them were Christians,” Megan says. There was a Catholic cathedral in every town, but no Protestant congregations, which she was more familiar with.

As a Christian, and a member of a Christian family, to be thrust into a life without church or Christian fellowship was quite isolating for Megan. At Easter, her host family took her on a trip to Amsterdam and on Easter Sunday they toured the red light district. She says, “it was so far from what I wanted to be doing at that time of year”.

Most of her Christian fellowship came via Skype and email from friends and family back in Australia. She says, “it wasn’t an ideal year because I didn’t know how to maintain my faith apart from the Christian community. I mainly credit it to God being very kind to me. I asked myself the question: ‘In the midst of no real support, am I going to be someone who loves and follows Jesus even when all those things are gone?’”

If she had her time again, she’d be more proactive about contacting mission agencies before she left Australia to find missionaries and evangelical churches in France. She says, “go for the cross cultural experiences, but do the research beforehand and find out as much as you can about the Christian support networks in the country.

She is not very keen on structured Christian gap years, saying that too often it “seems like a little closed community”. Megan would rather see people learning to “do faith stuff alongside all your life stuff”.

Megan says the real value of her gap year was the cross-cultural experience: “learning a language by full immersion, and living with four different families and learning to let go of my family norms”.

Her final words of advice: “go out on a limb and do something outside your support structures, but be wise, and get connected. And if you’re going to travel for six months, maybe plan to visit some churches that speak English”.

Image: Nicolas Raymond, Flickr, used under CC License