Coronavirus: A youth ministry liveblog

We are hugely grateful to the team at thirtyone:eight for their continued hard work and partnership on this vital resource. You can also find the document on thirtyone:eight’s website, which includes a range of other useful tools and materials.

The rapid rise in popularity of online video chat interface Zoom has brought with it a brand new and somewhat malevolent phenomenon. The practice of ‘Zoom-bombing’ sees people joining online chats and seeking to disrupt them by sharing explicit or unpleasant images, video and audio to the conversation. Once inside, the perpetrators are skilled at using multiple accounts to avoid being thrown off the call - meaning they’re quickly able to throw a video chat into chaos.

In order to prevent this from happening to a call, Zoom themselves have suggested a short list of steps you can take. You can find their response article here, but in brief summary:

1. You should avoid listing zoom links (Personal Meeting IDs) in public, and never allow screen sharing as a standard default for all users.
2. Familiarise yourself with the ways in which you’re able to manage participants as host (including muting individuals and locking the meeting), and make use of the ‘Waiting Room’ feature.
3. You might also want to consider password-protecting any Zoom meetings which aren’t open to the public as a standard good practice measure.

Many churches and youth groups are making use of Zoom in a variety of ways, and the likelihood is that as more people hear about this rather innovative method of online trolling, more cases of ‘Zoom-bombing’ are unfortunately likely to occur. It’s therefore important to take steps where possible to protect against an attack of this sort, which could otherwise lead to the unleashing of pornographic or other harmful material in the middle of a session.

3 MINUTES, 3 QUESTIONS, EVERY FRIDAY AT 3 O'CLOCK
We are scattered, physically distanced and isolated. Yet we’re going through similar experiences in a way that is entirely new. We have never done this before, and everyone is improvising. We thought it might be important to capture some of what this glorious community is doing, thinking and feeling during an entirely new experience.

But things are changing so rapidly we didn’t want to just ask once.

So we’re going to take a moment at the end of each working week, to ask you a few short questions about what is going on for you. It will be super quick – three minutes at most – and it will only ever be three questions. We’ll try to get a sense of what is important to reflect on or capture each week, but the questions will always focus on what it means to be a Christian youth worker during the Coronavirus pandemic. We will ask about you, youth ministry and young people.

Every Monday we’ll share what we found on the blog. We hope it will give you some insight about what is happening across the youth ministry community, but also help you feel connected to that community.

We are keen to know what you would ask, so please do email us with suggested questions, or let us know on social media.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Your answers are anonymous, and you can read the results every Monday at our Coronavirus liveblog. The questions will be open from 3pm on a Friday to 3pm on a Sunday and you can answer at any point during those 48 hours.

Your answers will be used to write blog posts and may be used to produce a report on youth ministry during the Coronavirus pandemic. All answers will be stored securely and destroyed after 12 months.

The Archbishop of York Youth Trust has produced a set of activities and resources for young people, particularly aimed at developing young leaders. You can download them all for free here.

Mike Pilavachi and Andy Croft, two of the key leaders from Soul Survivor Watford (and the long-running Soul Survivor festival which ended last Summer), are producing daily Biblical reflection and encouragement videos for teenagers. The first two are already online on the Soul Survivor YouTube channel here, and further episodes will appear each day. You can also find them on Spotify.

You could share these with young people as a regular bit of good quality input during the current period of social isolation, either by sharing the video each day or pointing groups to the channel.

The Youthscape team have been working hard to create new tools and resources to support youth leaders in response to the recent period of massive and rapid cultural change. Here’s a brand new one, hot off the press. ‘Together Apart’ is a short series of curriculum resources enabling you to explore life and faith with young people, and is designed specifically for use in the context of an online youth work session. And it’s absolutely FREE!

Each session includes a short programme around a theme, along with copious notes on everything that a youth leader might need to consider when running the session online. We’re not claiming that this is a revolutionary new youth work model - but we hope that it will prove really useful in the immediate context in which we find ourselves.

The first two sessions, written by Youthscape’s Hannah Bradley, can be downloaded below. Session one looks at the subject of trusting in God, and the second resource explores how Jesus changes lives. Another four sessions will follow in the next couple of weeks. We hope to bring you more innovative resources very soon - but for now, we hope these are useful, and as always we welcome your feedback!

Scouts have pulled together a list of over 100 indoors activities you can do with young people, whether that's for your youth group or for your own families. Each activity has its own page, with a list of materials needed, recommended age range, time frame, and a reflection tying it all together at the end.

How can you support young people without face-to-face interaction? How can you help them look after their wellbeing, and deal with challenging circumstances, without meeting together? Youthscape Luton has developed a new program that will provide online mentoring services to young people who want it. Young people can easily sign up for Digital Mentoring through this page, and with parental consent secured, they can check in for 20-minute video call sessions (once or twice a week) with a youth leader to talk about anything they want to. This is one of our local, Luton-based projects. Sadly we can't offer this service on a national scale, but we thought it might encourage you as you rethink familiar youth work models, and try to imagine what meeting the needs of young people looks like when all the rules have changed.

Could you attempt something similar where you are? Perhaps you've started already – if you've got a story you'd like to share of something you're trying out, don't hesitate to let us know!

A few different youth organisations, including the National Youth Agency, The Mix and UK Youth have collaborated to create an excellent page of resources for young people and youth workers. There are links to webinars, downloadable resources and some helpful links regarding vulnerable young people.

Dreaming the Impossible (run by Vineyard Churches) have put together a great downloadable digital resource. It includes an overview of Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. They also talk about what digital discipleship looks like now.

The NHS has issued a call for volunteers, from driving patients home after they've recovered, to taking food/medical supplies to the vulnerable, to checking in/calling lonely people. So far, over 250,000 people have signed up to volunteer. It's only for people aged over 18, so only the older youth in your group could get involved. But it might be a positive thing to get young people talking about: how can they seek to support the vulnerable people they know? Prayers, a phone call, a card or letter?

If you’re looking for resources to send to young people, you might want to point approximately half of them to a new video/audio podcast from Youthscape’s Martin Saunders. Based on his recent book The Man You’re Made to Be, this eponymous new series is an attempt to make the book’s content accessible to a wider range of young men, including those who struggle with reading. New episodes are released each Friday on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and a video version is available on YouTube. The first instalment is now available below.

On Friday, Youthscape and safeguarding charity thirtyone:eight published a new guidance document for staying safe while moving parts of your youth work online. You can download the first draft of the guidance here, but we want to keep adding the caveat that this is designed as a basis from which you can create your own online safeguarding policy; it’s not a policy all on its own.

The teams behind this free resource are continuing to think around this developing area of youth work, and keeping the guidance under constant review. They are already working on a revised version which should be available by the end of the week. It will again be available to download from this liveblog page, and directly from thirtyone:eight’s website.

HTB Youth Online has a page full of creative ideas for youth work online. You could send young people the link for their podcast or just get inspired by their "digital detox" idea. With the increase in online presence, why not challenge your youth group to do a deliberate detox for an hour a day?

Want a way of continuing to share experiences as a youth group from the comfort of your own home? In the coming weeks we’ll posting various simple ideas for an online youth group here on the liveblog.

How about virtually touring a museum together? Taking a trip around London landmarks? Or using Google Earth, or Google Arts & Culture, to explore some of America’s National Parks? The internet is full of virtual tours allowing people to experience places they are currently restricted from visiting in person. Many group video chat platforms have a share screen function enabling the entire group to see something on one person’s screen. This is highly useful for allowing the whole chat to experience something together.

MUSEUMS
Numerous famous museums are now online and open for virtual admission. Here’s a few that are definitely worth checking out:

• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
• Nasa Glenn Research Centre
• The British Museum
• Picasso Museum, Barcelona
• Benaki Museum, Athens
• National Palace Museum, Taipei City

CITIES/ LANDMARKS
New sites and new experiences are being added to the digital world on a regular basis. Some great ones that are already up and running include:

• Visit London
• Easter Island
• National Parks of the USA

For an online session, it’s important to remember that not all the young people will be interested in seeing round a museum or landmark. Keep the tour short and engaging. Check it out for yourself beforehand and identify what the best features are so as to direct the group to the most interesting areas.

You could even use the tour to play a game! Go through the site beforehand and note down a list of objects / words you see. During your online youth group, tell the young people the list of things they should look out for. Have them come up with their own buzzer noise which they have to make as soon as they spot something from the list. Keep it fun and interactive so as to keep the young people interested.

Want to get your youth group praying in creative ways? Or just struggling to find the words/inspiration for your own prayer life at this time? Our friends at 24/7 Prayer have written up prayer guides for the Coronavirus and you can sign up for virtual prayer rooms. Prayer Spaces in Schools have also released some guidance for family-friendly prayers.