‘Troublemakers?’ I queried.

‘Adji’ nodded. ‘Every year,’ he explained patiently,’ there are some lads who are the chief mischief-makers. So we’ve found it helps to spot them right from the start and make sure they can’t do any damage.’

And they proceeded to discuss the campers one by one. Finally they drew up a list of five names that would receive special attention. They were the ‘black sheep’. Somebody even used that phrase.

My jaw had dropped to the floor at the start of all this, and so I uttered no protest. I left the meeting determined to prove the officers wrong. These lads were no worse than anybody else, and I at least would give them a chance...

But the boys had been to camp before. They knew how it worked. And so (without anyone having to say anything) everybody on site knew, before the following lunchtime, who the ‘black sheep’ were going to be this year. Consequently, they joined in and played their part to perfection. The prophecy turned out to be wonderfully self-fulfilling...

That’s one extreme example of how Christians apply discipline badly. A few years later, when I took up a job as youth worker in a large church, I discovered the other extreme. There was just no discipline at all.

Indeed, some of the workers were curiously proud of the reputation our youth group possessed: ‘You’ll find it hard to take them away for a weekend,’ I was told, ‘because we’ve been barred from every Christian conference centre in the area. We’ve smashed them all up.’ The church had great facilities - most of which were tatty and vandalized. There was a reasonable annual supply of new young people (it was a big church, after all) but none of the older ones showed much spiritual progress. For years, kids had reached the age of sixteen, and simply abandoned Christianity.

Too much discipline - or too little? It’s one of the most common (and crucial) dilemmas for church-based youth leaders. And the less disciplined our society becomes - with overflowing prisons full of young adults, leading footballers behaving like hooligans, families imposing fewer and fewer expectations upon their little darlings - the more problematic it gets. Some youth workers win through by the sheer force of their personalities, or by a natural instinct for motivating people. For the rest of us, it’s not so easy. How can we learn the secret of doing it effectively?

Well, first we need to understand what discipline isn’t. Let’s begin by demolishing seven common myths...

Discipline is not an optional extra. Walking away from bad behaviour simply stores up problems for the future. Hoping problems will never arise is just naive. All of us, at some point, will encounter disciplinary situations that need to be addressed; and we need to have our act together well beforehand.

Discipline is not something that happens only when there’s misbehaviour. We tend to think of ‘discipline’ as something that needs to be applied when a crisis blows up. But actually it should be there all the time - quiet, unobtrusive, yet controlling. And if it is, we’ll have far fewer crises.

Discipline is not an expression of dislike. We discipline people, not because we don’t love them, but because we do. Says veteran American youth worker Scott Noon, ‘The opposite of love isn’t hatred, it’s indifference. Discipline expresses that we care about kids as people so they grow into mature, responsible adults.’

Discipline is not a vehicle for anger. It’s not an excuse to blow your top. Indeed, the more furious you are, the less likely it is that you’ll discipline people properly.

Discipline is not about blame. The aim is not to pronounce sentence and identify the guilty person. The best result is when a young person agrees with you about his behaviour (even if he wouldn’t admit it out loud!) and starts to see ways of changing in future.

Discipline isn’t a threat to good relationships. Sometimes we’re fearful of applying sanctions in case it ruins our work with a young person (‘If I bar him from club for three weeks, like the rules say, perhaps he’ll never come back’). If you exercise discipline appropriatelyand sensitively, the relationship with the young person may well be stronger than it was before.

Discipline isn’t a perfect science. Sometimes you’ll make mistakes. Apologise frankly, and move on. Young people don’t expect us to be immaculate; but they do expect transparent honesty.

How do you build a youth group where discipline runs smoothly and well? First, you have to stop listening to the ‘explanations’ for bad behaviour which are actually just excuses. ‘It’s the area they come from’; ‘She isn’t very bright’; ‘They get off with too much at home’; ‘It’s only a minority of trouble-makers’ - there may be some truth in these analyses, but ultimately they don’t help. They just shift the blame somewhere else, remove the focus from what you can actually do about the situation, and make you feel demoralized. In fact, there is a lot your group can do to change things. Don’t assume that the way they behave with you is simply a reflection of the way they behave at home; I’ve often been surprised to visit the homes of my kids, and find that they behave there quite differently from how I expected! In fact, your group has a distinct ‘culture’ which will shape their behaviour for better or worse - whether you are conscious of it or not.

A group with a good disciplinary ‘culture’ has four features. First, it’s proactive. It doesn’t wait for problems to emerge before doing something about them. Instead, its leaders talk about the rules they will set, the relationships they will attempt to build, the likely flashpoints which have to be defused, the possible areas of temptation for mischief-makers, and try to head off trouble before it arrives. (If this sounds like ‘Commie’s’ approach - it isn’t. He was assuming that trouble was inevitable, and trying to find the guilty party before the crime was committed! Proactive groups, on the other hand, try to prevent the crime from ever becoming a possibility.)

A good group is collaborative. The leaders work together, sharing approaches, supporting each other, pooling information about young people who need more help and guidance than others, backing one another up. They ensure that it’s impossible for kids to play one leader off against another, because their communication systems are carefully set in place.

A good group is a community. Leaders take time to see the kids outside group meeting hours, and so everybody develops a sense of everybody else as a human being with a life they all understand and observe. In too many badly-run groups, the leaders descend from Planet Adultworld five minutes before the meeting starts, and take off back there immediately afterwards. No wonder the kids think they’re aliens.

Finally, a good group highlights ownership. The more young people feel they ‘own’ the group, the more they’ll help to police it themselves - ‘Hey, stop that, Darren, you’re mucking it up for the rest of us’ - and so a good group aims to build a sense of pride and identity amongst its members. The dynamics of the group encourage people to develop their own self-discipline. By contrast, bad groups tend to have either a climate of conflict, with constant tension in the atmosphere and frequent run-ins between leaders and miscreants; or a culture of apathy, where rules are never applied, nobody cares about standards, and anything goes.

So far, so good. But how do you build it? A few years ago I invited the Head of a school in an extremely tough area to visit my team and teach them about discipline. She surprised them by never once referring to techniques, punishments, rewards or penalties. She simply said, ‘Ninety per cent of discipline is in your preparation.’

I believe she was absolutely right. So that’s where we’ll start next time.