Coronavirus: A youth ministry liveblog

Are you drafting volunteers in to help with your youth group? Trying to get people up to speed with online youth work? Or maybe you're still looking for some help and support. Youth for Christ has a whole range of resources, including sample sessions, video tutorials and physical resources you can get on their website. Check it all out here.

Are you planning to get some extra training in during this time? Esteem Acet UK are running a four-day accredited Relationships and Sex Education Training programme online. You'll learn how to:

• Support young people in building self-esteem
• Support young people in developing healthy relationships
• Develop confidence in talking openly and sensitively about sexual health issues
• Support young people to develop skills and resilience to deal with the influence and impact of modern technology on relationships and sex (including porn)
• Communicate to young people the importance of making healthy life choices about sex
• Plan and deliver effective, fun and interactive sessions with young people
• Apply best practice and recommended government policy guidelines

They are also posting out a pack of physical resources to use during the training, including #isitOK?, the sexting resource that Youthscape and Esteem Acet UK worked on together.

Onelife Leaders have put together some ready-to-use resources for youth workers during the pandemic, including online gatherings for youth workers, discipleship tools and some helpful blog posts. Check it all out here.

Things have been a little quieter this week with the bank holidays on Friday and Monday and people taking time off to celebrate Easter. That being said there’s still been some great content on the liveblog and, like last week, we want to bring you the highlights of posts you might have missed:

• It’s been great to see whole organisations embrace life online and so encouraging to see both Princeton Theological Seminary and The National Youth Agency bring events and training on to a digital platform. On Wednesday 29th April, Princeton Theological Seminary's Institute for Youth Ministry is running a Digital Forum on Youth Ministry titled "Revisioning Youth Ministry: Failure, Grief, and Hope". This is set to be an informative and engaging event designed to bring support and encouragement to youth leaders on a personal level, as well as in a professional capacity, as they seek to minister to young people during this challenging time. Before then, The National Youth Agency is holding a free webinar over Zoom about how to do detached youth work during Covid-19. The event takes place this Friday, 17th April, from 2-3pm.
• Unfortunately, several Christian conferences have had to cancel this year due to the current circumstances. However, Spring Harvest Festival have put together a completely free, online Christian conference, available for anyone via their Youtube channel. There are talks, devotionals and worship all around the theme of “Unleashed – The Acts Church Today" and it’s definitely worth checking out.
• Dr Lucie Shuker, Director of the Youthscape Centre for Research, released a very interesting Monday Report which examined youth leaders’ responses to questions about flouting, furlough and finding new connections. The research team are doing weekly 3x3 questions (3 minutes, 3 questions, every week at 3 o'clock) and your input in those surveys is greatly appreciated. We've changed the day to Thursday, to give you a bit more time! Find out more about this research in this week's podcast.
• We've released the latest in our "Together Apart: youth work online" series. We've been creating free, easy to use session plans for your youth work. Find the latest one here.

Again, we want to thank you so much for your support and if there’s something you’d love to see or even something you want to contribute in coming weeks please get in touch!

As a youth leader, investing in young people is at the heart of what you do. You want to see young people thrive in all areas of their lives. In this time of online youth work, it’s difficult to know how best to come alongside your youth group and continue to offer them holistic support.

With some young people becoming increasingly frustrated with life in lockdown, one practical way you can encourage them is by inspiring them to explore new activities, hobbies and skills during the isolation period. Young people have more time than ever to try new things and pursue new skills. Many organisations, both educational and recreational, have responded to the current lockdown by putting material online which is readily available for anyone to access. This is the perfect time for young people to experiment with something they’ve never done before – they just need to know what’s out there!

Here’s a list of things you can inspire your young people to try:

• Cooking classes – several chain restaurants have recipes and cooking tutorials available via their social media accounts or youtube channels. These include Wagamama’s ‘wok from home’ and Zizzi’s #zizzirecipes.
• Khan Academy – this free online programme might sound a bit too much like your usual school work but there’s a far greater variety of courses available online than in your normal classroom. There’s everything from a course on Storytelling, which has you create your own theme park, to World History, highlighting key moments in various cultures throughout time.
• Learn how to code – Hour of Code offers free beginner tutorials on how to code. Everything from Google logos to apps to Minecraft landscapes.
• Photography classes – during the month of April, photography giant Nikon, is offering courses for free!
• Learn a language – there are several apps available to download that will help you get started with learning a new language. Apps such as ‘Memrise’ and ‘Duolingo’ are free, easy to use and fun to explore.

Why not direct your young people to some of these courses/activities and help them make the most of the time they have during quarantine? At the end of a youth group session, you could challenge your young people to try out at least one new activity before you meet again. For something like the cooking classes, why not encourage them to make something and send in a picture? Before recommending young people to certain websites, please make sure you follow your usual safeguarding procedures regarding consents and pre-evaluating content.

Spring Harvest Festival was due to take place this week, but due to the lockdown, they have had to cancel. But they have pulled together to create Spring Harvest Home - a completely free, online Christian conference, available for anyone. On their YouTube channel, you'll find talks, worship and devotionals for all age groups. The theme this year is “Unleashed – The Acts Church Today". There's lots of material for your youth group to enjoy together. Check it out!

Parents! Youth workers! Are you struggling to engage young people in creative prayer at the moment?

Prayer Spaces in Schools have come up with a set of downloadable PDFs with ideas for creating prayer spaces for young people at home. Check them out here.

Girls’ Brigade Ministries is releasing weekly activity sheets suitable for any children and young people, not just Girls’ Brigade community group members, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The resources are part of a free resource zone open to all on the charity’s new website, which only launched last month.

GB Ministries (GBM) Director Jules Murdy says "We're in a strange new world right now but GB still wants to provide hope and fun for all children and young people. So, we’re really pleased to be able to offer these GB@home resources to enable children and young people to have access to positive, hope-filled, materials during the time they’re restricted to home due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We hope both GB leaders and parents find the resources easy to use and share."

The activity sheets are aimed at 4 age groups – 4 to 8s, 7 to 11s, 10 to 14s, and 13 to 18s – and include activities such as games, craft, Bible studies, and discussion points. There is also a free certificate template to download and print to celebrate children and young people’s achievements as they use the resources.

The new GBM website aims to showcase all of GBM’s projects; from the popular Koko blog to the 450 community groups.

The site also contains a tool mapping where all the GB community groups are, and the resource zone also shares programme materials that any youth workers and churches could use on topics such as loss, friendship, and kindness.

The Methodist Church has collected some resources for Holy Week at home for families and individuals. Their Children, Youth and Families team have created a Holy Week journal for young people, which you can find here. There are also creative ideas for how to engage with Maundy Thursday at home.

Looking for another group activity to do with young people during the lockdown? Instead of the usual in-person movie night, why not have a Netflix party? Netflix Party is an add-on to Netflix that allows people with different accounts to all watch the same thing at the same time. If someone pauses the show to grab some popcorn, it’s paused for everyone. There’s also a fun chat option at the side so people can send comments to one another while the movie’s going on.

This will only work if everyone in your youth group has a Netflix account. The other challenge is that Netflix Party is only compatible when running on a laptop or desktop computer because it's downloaded and run via Chrome. Hopefully, even if a young person doesn’t have their own account or own a computer, someone in the family will be willing to let them borrow theirs for the night.

Prior to any party, make sure you follow your usual safeguarding procedures regarding consents and also ensure you’re not exposing young people to anything which isn’t age-appropriate. Netflix has an abundance of movies to choose from but why not select something that you can use to fuel discussions in subsequent group meetups?

Films like ‘Lion’, ‘The Boy who Harnessed the Wind’ and ‘The Theory of Everything’. All these movies contain inspirational themes of characters who overcome immense challenges. You could pull out themes from the movies and link to bible stories with similar themes. Use these movies as a link between the experiences of fictional characters and lessons learnt from reading scripture.

Here’s how you’d go about setting up your lockdown movie night:

• Download and install the Netflix Party extension from Chrome
• Make sure all the young people have also downloaded the extension otherwise they won’t be able to join the party
• Load the Netflix website and choose a movie
• Choose something light-hearted and funny to watch – something young people would naturally laugh and chat about if they were watching it in person
• Turn that solo-movie into a party by clicking on the red NP at the top right of the screen
• Start the party and invite your youth group to join by sharing the URL
• They then can click on that URL invite which will load their own Netflix account and they join the movie by clicking on the red NP in the top right of their screen

The Diocese of London Children & Youth has a page full of useful resources: helpful links for young people, children and families. They've also been running online discussions; you can tune into them or watch videos of previous discussions. Find it all here.

Our friends at Open Doors Youth have created resources for young people and youth leaders for this time of isolation, learning lessons from the persecuted church. You can subscribe here to receive weekly emails, videos, podcasts and reflections around these themes: uncertainty, isolation, lack and fear.

At the best of times, we turn to video games to keep children busy or provide some light entertainment and bonding. Now, with much more time inside it’s easy simply to ramp up that same approach.

However, video games can offer much more than that for young people. Like any media, they are a new way to tell stories, to engage with the world, to make sense of life. But as well as that, they can also offer a powerful space in which to find calm, hope, peace and even a bit of control when the world around us feels far from that.

The challenge is finding the games that offer these things at the right time. Writer and broadcaster Andy Robertson (who was one of the contributors at last November’s National Youth Ministry Weekend) has put together The Family Video Game Database as a resource to help you do just this. It’s a huge collection of information about video games arranged into lists.

Along with the usual lists about playing together on the couch, or online, there are some more interesting ones that point to games with a deeper side. For example:

• Find Calm
• Hope Through Play
• Laugh and Relax

One of the lists in the database has been put together by the LTN (Love Thy Nerd) Christian gaming community to highlight games that challenge us to love our neighbour. Other interesting highlights include a list of games that offer tough ethical decisions, games that invite you to inhabit another world or walk in someone else’s shoes.

If you’ve never played games yourself before, the site encourages you to try out the games picked out specifically as your first video game.

The full set of lists in the database are here and you can search for any game by platform, genre, theme, PEGI rating, here.

Interested in further reading? You can also find Andy's book: "Exploring Spirituality in Video Games" here and news about an upcoming book here.

A group of collaborators from across the Church have created a crowdsourced Google Doc with advice for churches during the pandemic. It's regularly updated and includes tips for live-streaming, links to webinars, advice for crisis management and links to helpful blog posts.