Debra Green OBE: ’Just because you’re a Christian, it doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to your children, so be ready'

Debra, you have worked for many years now helping people through Redeeming Our Communities, can you give us a sense of where that ministry came from?

Well, I was born in Middleton in East Manchester into an ordinary working-class home. We moved to London for a few years with my dad’s job and by the time we moved back to Manchester, when I was about 12, things had changed a lot. We now had more money, so we moved into a nice area of South Manchester into a big house but sadly my parents had walked away from faith and then I went through a rebellious phase in my teenager years. My life then changed through an event at school which I’ll mention later on but also unexpectedly, at my wedding day we were singing a version of the 23^rd Psalm and God showed up. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I sort of knew it was God. Then things started to change around me in my family.

I wasn’t the kind of person who would ask for help or to admit that I had a problem. But because we were part of a church, we had a support network

My dad had been searching and had gone back to church, and I went along with him and became a Christian. Then 6 months later my husband was also converted. So, in the space of a few months, me my day, my husband and then also my mum all became Christians. And it didn’t stop there. My husband and I felt a strong call into full-time Christian ministry so we started leading a church and it was whilst leading that church that I had a vision for a network of churches working for the good of the wider community all across Manchester, which was the start of Redeeming Our Communities (RoC) which was formally set up in 2004. It was pretty quick and intense.

What it was like growing up in in your family?

One of the things that was really significant for me was I was the eldest child and once my dad started earning more money I went to a posh fee-paying school but eventually I just rebelled against the whole idea that I was this sensible responsible girl, I didn’t want to obey the rules anymore, I wanted to do my own thing and have fun, or at least what I thought fun was back then.

Then I had a crunch moment. One day a teacher came to me and just said you are not going to achieve anything in life, you’re not going to pass any of your exams, you’re not going to have a career, you’re wasting your life. It was one of those ones where it was going to either devastate me or motivate me and it motivated me. Turns out that I’m the sort of person that wants to prove people wrong when they say something can’t be done. So, I knuckled down and eventually qualified as a teacher.

What do you think you’ve taken from your parents in terms of how to approach life?

I guess that whilst my parents walked away from the faith they had been raised in the church, so some Christian values permeated our home. My parents were very faithful to each other and committed to our family, they worked hard but balanced that with being there for us too. That showed itself in how they reacted to my rebellious phase. I was the eldest and so they didn’t have the experience of handling a rebellious teenager. They weren’t part of a church and hadn’t gone to any parenting classes, but they held on in there, they didn’t throw me out they just did the best they could in the circumstances.

And tell us a bit about your own parenting experiences

We’ve got four children, 2 girls and 2 boys, they’re all married now and 3 of the 4 have got their own children as well - so, we’ve got 7 grandchildren.

Family life took me by surprise because I had not really got any maternal instinct. I hadn’t had any experience of, looking after babies or anything like that. I’d done a little bit of babysitting, but I didn’t really know what to do with one end of the baby from the other. I remember coming home from hospital with my first baby sitting on the sofa just staring at her thinking: will somebody tell me what to do!

We do need to protect children from a number of things but we can’t protect them from life, life is going to happen and when they’re older, if we’ve constantly shielded them from life, they will probably not have the tools to navigate challenge

I wasn’t well prepared, and the problem was that I wasn’t the kind of person who would ask for help or to admit that I had a problem. But because we were part of a church, we had a support network, people were praying and helping. Some women had formed a group called Christian Viewpoint and I started going to it as a younger mother and learning a lot from them. These women who had brought up children had suffered, they’d been through different types of experiences like baby loss, depression, marriage breakdown or financial difficulty and so they were able to help me through some of those things as well. Then there was the role modelling. If you’re part of a group then you observe things in other people, parenting styles or ways of dealing with children, ways of handling marital conflict. So, I didn’t even need to ask for help, as I could see ways of dealing with issues.

Co-leading a church with 4 children in tow must have been busy!

Yes, it was difficult. My husband went back to university to study theology, so there was a lot going on, it felt like we were juggling things all the time. Back then there wasn’t the same kind of notion about sharing roles and responsibilities as much as there is now so most of the work around the home fell to me, so yes it was a busy time. Sometimes it worked and sometimes you were juggling too much, and you just would drop some stuff on the floor!

In terms of raising your children in the faith, what worked well?

I think work well for us is prayer. I would pray with the children every day, usually when they went to bed at night – they still talk to me about their memories of that. And my own lifeline as parent was prayer. I’m very passionate about prayer, prayer for the city, but also, you’ve got to practice it in your own home. So, praying for the children was a really big thing.

the number one lesson I’ve learned as a parent is that you cannot be with your children 24/7, but the Holy Spirit is

Also, there was the way in which we involved our children in ministry. Our kids were pastor’s kids, and we all know the advantages and disadvantages of that, but it meant that they were brought up in church, which meant that they saw all the good things and the bad things so they had to develop resilience and develop their spirituality around the experiences that they had, the good and the bad. We had the dilemma of them hearing and seeing things which part of us wanted to protect them from like when we went through a church split at one point. The kids saw it and you have the danger of those children becoming quite angry with the church but through talking about it, all of my kids have come through that and have got the emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence to work some of those things out.

Those experiences could have a negative or positive impact on your children, what do you think happened so that it was positive for them?

Prayer is so key because we didn’t have it all plain sailing. Even though I would now say that I can see the benefits of what they experienced, it wasn’t necessarily an automatic thing, prayer was central but so also was the way we responded to them and the situation. We do need to protect children from a number of things but we can’t protect them from life, life is going to happen and when they’re older, if we’ve constantly shielded them from life, they will probably not have the tools to navigate challenge.

Let me give you and example, one of my sons went through a rebellious stage at 17 and he ended up getting locked up in a police station in Manchester, which is really challenging for me because I was actually working with the police to reduce crime and here’s my child getting locked up for the weekend in the police station. But we were praying round the clock and he had this major experience of God in the police station where he got on his knees and repented and God’s, turned his life around. So even those experiences were very hard at the time, but when I look back on it and see where he is now, he’s come through that. Now he’s in his early 30s and he’s got a ministry to actually Gen Z and he’s doing amazing things, preaching the gospel around the world and everything like that.

Read more:

Janie Oliver: ‘Parenting definitely won’t be what you expect but if you let yourself, you’ll find joy and magic in places you won’t anticipate.’

Clare Williams: ‘I thank my parents for showing me what it means to pray and pray without ceasing’

Graham Daniels: Parenting is ‘a long game and of course a game that we ultimately are not in control over’

So the number one lesson I’ve learned as a parent is that you cannot be with your children 24/7, but the Holy Spirit is. The second lesson is that if you’re going through something now that looks absolutely terrible and you can’t even think that there could be any positive thing that could ever come out of it, that is not the end of the story. You keep praying, you keep the door open, you keep channels of communication open. That child is going to remember what you instilled in them when they were younger. One of my favourite verses from the Bible is train up a child in the way they should go and when they’re older they will not depart from it. It might be when they’re older, when they’re in the 30s, or even their 50s, but they’re going to remember the model that you were to them and the prayer life that you had and the church life that they were part of.

And were there things that didn’t work so well for you as a parent?

I think I was very naive as a younger Christian. I believed that if I lived my life in the way that God wanted, if I was a good Christian, read my Bible, prayed, fasted, tithed etc. then nothing would go wrong – as if God is a slot machine. If you put something in, something’s going to come out – but God isn’t a slot machine. The world doesn’t work like that. In the Bible, it’s really clear that we’re going to face troubles, trials and suffering. So when a few things went wrong, I wasn’t really prepared for problems and if I’m honest when trouble first came it threw me.

If you could give advice to yourself the day before your first child was born, what would it be?

I’d say ask for help. Don’t feel that you can or even need to do it all on your own.

And then don’t be naive about some of the dangers that exist. Just because you’re a Christian, it doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to your children, so be ready.

Debra Green OBE is the National Director and Founder of Redeeming Our Communities (ROC), founded in 2004; a registered charity and Limited company. She is frequently asked to speak at events and conferences. She also speaks at conferences organised by statutory authorities and public services. She has authered a number of books including her latest Way Maker written with her son Josh.