Coronavirus: A youth ministry liveblog

The National Youth Agency is holding a free webinar over Zoom about how to do detached youth work during Covid-19. They've invited Graeme Tiffany and Emily Collinsbeare from the Federation for Detached Youth Work to speak. It's happening on Friday 17th April from 2-3pm and you can find all the details here.

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.

Princeton Theological Seminary's Institute for Youth Ministry are running a Digital Forum on Youth Ministry on Weds 29th April. The title of the event is: "Revisioning Youth Ministry: Failure, Grief, and Hope".

The leaders include Kenda Creasy Dean and Eric Barreto. Small group leaders include Aqueelah Ligonde, Marcus Hong, Kermit Moss, Erin Raffety, Shari Oosting, Erik Leafblad, and more.

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.

"We're not keeping this to ourselves, we're passing it along to the next generation - God's fame and fortune, the marvellous things he has done." (Psalm 78:4 MSG)

Tonight we’re praying for churches to have a greater desire and capacity to connect with and serve young people, during this lockdown and beyond.

Young people growing up in church need a safe space to grow in their faith. They’re living in a world where being a Christian makes them the odd one out and which is often critical, even hostile, to that faith.

Beyond the church, young people in our communities are growing up in a world where there are hardly any opportunities to explore the big questions of life or get help to face the pressures of being a teenager.

One hundred years ago, nearly 80% of young people were connected with a church where some of that could happen. Now it’s less than 3%.

Lots of churches long to find ways to meaningfully connect with young people - but they’re not sure how. Let’s pray that churches find, through prophetic imagination, creative ways to connect with young people and draw them closer to God.

Thank you, God, for calling your church to tell of your great deeds to the emerging generations. We pray that while church leaders across our nation engage in new ways to ‘do’ church, that there will be a growing desire to reach emerging generations. We pray that entire churches will be equipped to reach young people. We pray for an unleashing of resources into youth ministry and for you to raise up a wave of your people, eager to reach, serve, champion and disciple young people.
Amen

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.

We've been posting a lot on this liveblog and we don't want you to miss out, so we thought we’d give you a mid-week round-up of some our highlights you might have missed over the last seven days:

• Together Apart session three and session four came out this week! These comprehensive session plans are part of a short series enabling you to explore life and faith with young people, designed specifically for the context of online youth work.
• There have been several great podcasts released in the last week but in particular, we recommend checking out Dr Kate Middleton’s insights into the mental health of young people during isolation. There are tips and practical advice applicable to both young people and youth leaders alike. On a similar theme, another great article to check out is Young Minds blog post 'Young people's self-care tips for self-isolation’ which features practical advice from young people themselves!
• Writer and broadcaster Andy Robertson shared some excellent content on the ‘Spirituality of Games’. He challenged us to reevaluate the way we view video games and how these games are more than just entertainment to young people – they are a new way to tell stories, to engage with the world and make sense of life.
• Our friends at Open Doors Youth have created some incredible resources for young people and youth leaders for this time of isolation – learning lessons from the persecuted church. These resources are available in several different media forms and explore themes of uncertainty, isolation, lack and fear.
• The ultimate ‘Lockdown Listicle’ appeared on the liveblog just in time for the start of the Easter ‘holidays’! This list brings together 99 fun, thoughtful and creative ideas young people can try out over the next couple of weeks.

These are just a few highlights from a week of all-around incredible content. 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!

Starting digital evangelism for the first time? Need tips for how to use social media to reach young people? We recommend this blog post by our friend Ben Cutting, digital evangelist at Youth for Christ. We love this quote about digital evangelism for the long haul:

"In that sense, digital evangelism is like dieting. You can shortcut the proper process and get some instant results but long term, it requires time and consistency to be more than a flash in the pan. I want to encourage you that when all this is over and the youth group can meet up again, please continue what you have started online."

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.

In the coming weeks we’re posting simple ideas for online youth work here on the liveblog. So far, we’ve thought about taking young people on Virtual Tours of exciting locales from the comfort of their own home (admittedly, that phrase works better when you’re not on mandatory lockdown) and we’ve thought about how young people could invest in their communities and reach out to the elderly and vulnerable.

Now let’s get creative. Want to switch up how you do youth group notices, or looking for an artistic, fun new way to get people talking and creating? Why not make a stop motion movie?

Stop motion is a form of animation where a video is made by taking a number of photos and moving things around bit by bit between each shot. When the images are then played back sequentially, what was static is now moving. Stop motion animation is behind well-loved classics like Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Nightmare Before Christmas. Stop-motion allows you to make a high-quality film using minimal resources.

Want to inspire the young people you work with to try something they’ve never done before? Explain the concept of a stop motion film and encourage them to make their own. You could use this as a way of making a collaborative youth group movie. If you decide on a storyline, each young person could film from 30-60 seconds of images, and those individual scenes could be collected and edited together to make a complete animation.

Here is a step-by-step guide you / they can work through to make the movie. There’s also a handy how-to video below:

STEP 1: Download a stop motion video app and familiarise yourself with how it works. Apps such as Stop Motion Studio are free to use and put the movies together for you. All you have to do is take the photos and move the characters.

STEP 2: Choose your characters. The cast of your movie is completely up to you! You could use Lego people, stick men, soft toys or even everyday household items. Toy Story 4 was headlined by a plastic spork, so shoot for the moon.

STEP 3: Come up with a rough storyline. Nothing too long or complicated. It can be as easy as having a character climb the stairs or fight an opponent. Remember for each move your character makes you’ll have to take a load of photos so the simpler the scene, the better.

STEP 4: …Action! Time to get the camera rolling. Open the app on your device and set up the first scene. Take your photo. Next, move the characters slightly – it could be adjusting an arm, moving them forward an inch, etc. Once you’ve set your new scene you can take another photo. Continue moving your characters bit by bit for each new photo. Once you’re happy they’ve reached the end of the scene, hit play and watch your stop motion movie from start to finish.

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.

Want a way of continuing to share experiences as a youth group from the comfort of your own home? In the coming weeks we’re posting simple ideas for online youth work here on the liveblog, you can read idea #1: Virtual Tours, here.

During recent weeks, it’s been incredible to see people come together and offer support to one another during such difficult times. Here's a way to engage your group in the midst of quarantine, and help them to invest in their community:

IDEA #2: BRING GENERATIONS TOGETHER - INVITE YOUNG PEOPLE TO WRITE TO AN ELDERLY PERSON IN THEIR COMMUNITY.
We know that some of those most at risk now are the elderly, and that elderly people are already some of the most isolated in our communities. A letter, email or card could brighten up someone’s day and bring real encouragement. Here are the practical steps:

• Identify older, vulnerable people in your community who would be open to receiving a message from a young person. If you work for a church, identify isolated older people in your congregation and ask for their home/email addresses. If your youth work context is not church based, how about contacting a local care home? Ask them if they would be up for receiving correspondence from your youth group and distributing the message to residents. If they are worried about the risk associated with letters coming in, check to see if emails would be appropriate. Emails could be printed off on site and delivered to rooms or read aloud.
• Get the young people you work with on board. Use this as an opportunity to talk to your young people about social action and caring for their neighbours. Tell them they can be creative as they want to be with their messages. If they’re struggling with what to write, point them towards a Bible passage, poem or song lyrics. Challenge them to see this practical exercise as a way of looking after some of the most vulnerable people and a way in which they can potentially make a real difference in someone’s day.

The Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health have uploaded a podcast to talk about how to help young people and children with autism during this pandemic. They give some practical tips on how to help manage anxiety, maintain structure and explain the situation to young people.

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.