There’s no smut, no sex and no celebrity gossip. It’s the UK’s most recent explicitly Christian teenage magazine and it’s hitting the market next month.
Glossy and small enough to slip in a handbag, Gracemag promises girls aged 11-16 a “mind, body and soul” read with an “ethical edge and a campaigning spirit”. A pilot copy available now on the website is packed with tips for ethical living, Bible verses to help to combat stress, articles on parents “Do you understand them?” and quizzes rating you as a daughter “Are you devoted or distant?”. “Forget boys or make-up” reads the headline on one sample article, “Jessie Flowers, 16, wants to play rugby for England.”
Paul Handley, the executive editor, and editor of the Church Times, explains: “The basic idea is simple: a magazine that encourages girls to enjoy life as it is, and doesn’t push them too quickly into adulthood. Everybody talks about children being forced to grow up too quickly – girls feel this themselves – but there’s little on the newsstands to encourage them to develop confidently at their own pace.”
In August the first copies of Gracemag, all 50,000 of them, will be distributed nationwide and free. Yes, the usual teen mag staples are there: the boy band interview, tick, the problem page, tick, the quizzes and fashion shoots, tick. But the celeb-sex-shopping fest usual in Gracemag’s secular rivals, Bliss, Sugar and co, is refreshingly absent. A “real debate” about the content of such magazines needs to be had, says Christine Miles, Gracemag’s editor, remarking that the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in 2004 accused teen magazines of “glamorising promiscuity”.
“Magazines out there promote an unrealistic celebrity lifestyle with superskinny models and don’t have a wider emphasis about what else is in life,” she says. “Teenage girls want more,” says Miles, referring to a recent Unicef report on children in OECD countries that singled out British girls between the ages of 11 and 15 as an especially dissatisfied group.
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“We have to ask questions about this,” says Miles. She already has. For the past two years, Miles and her team have questioned, surveyed and chatted to vast networks of teenage girls via church youth clubs and networks, or at annual Christian music festivals. Their input – along with the feed-back from a readers’ panel of more than 100 teenage girls – has determined Gracemag’s content.
“From the surveys, big questions came back: the Iraq war, the environment and climate change, what are the results of Make Poverty History? Girls really care about these issues, although they also wrote in asking how to get along with boys or an annoying younger sister,” Miles explains.
On relationships, the magazine’s focus is more on friends and family than boys per se: “There’s a culture where if you don’t have a boyfriend you are slightly weird but at this age, girls have got enough pressures on them as it is,” says Miles.
Another big issue for Gracemag’s target readership is faith: “Girls this age are asking questions like ‘What is the meaning of life? What am I here for?’ They’re really interested in reading other girls’ experience of gaining faith. A 14-year-old girl from Bristol wrote in to tell me how God had helped her face her fear of going to the dentist.”
Light nuggets of biblical wisdom – comfort from the Scriptures on, say, anxiety, will be a regular staple of the magazine. “We aren’t preachy but girls are interested in finding out what wisdom is in the Bible, what the Bible has to say about life, self-esteem, self-worth. After all, Jesus said, ‘I will give you life in abundance’,” says Miles.
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Although the magazine is funded by a grant from the Archbishop of Canterbury and various church trusts, faith isn’t a must for readers. “We don’t assume everyone reading Grace will be of the Christian faith or have a faith,” says Miles, a former youth worker who is now features editor at the Church Times. But questioning faith is part of being a teenager, she believes. “Girls aren’t stupid, they’ve got a mind and make their own decisions.”
One issue shared by teenage girls of all faiths and none is self-esteem: “Many write in to say I don’t understand why we should feel so bad about who we are and the pressures we don’t need – about weight, about looks, all kinds of pressure. Girls instinctively have self-worth, gifts and talent to share with their friends, their school and the wider world,” says Miles.
Gracemag will be launched at the Greenbelt Christian Music and Arts Festival on August 25. Girls and youth groups can sign up for a free copy of the first issue at www.gracemag.co.uk; the first issue is free, subsequent copies cost £2.50