Newday presents: Youth Culture

Serious youth violence is increasing, mental health issues are growing and sexual liberty is leaving more and more young people damaged - often dealing with the consequences online with exposure to the wider world.

But we believe that the good news of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is timeless and the freedom He brings speaks into every age, to every area, to every issue and is available to all.

How do you get to grips with the real issues that are challenging and influencing young people today? We want to provide a better understanding, develop compassion and sharpen practical skills to help you love and disciple young people in a greater way.

So we’re inviting you to be part of making a change, to help bring true Hope to the generations emerging.

Register for our monthly Youth Culture Forum were we hear from leading experts on the biggest issues, as well as grounding the topic in practical youth work and discuss how to best disciple young people.

Listen to the most recent Forum conversation below…

TELL ME MORE

As the identity of young people is being distorted and lost, living virtual lives that show the world life is perfect and so is my body, behind the cheery faces or hard exteriors is a monsoon of questions and concerns, insecurities and ill-feelings. Youth culture today is facing some of the biggest challenges of the last 100 years.

By the grace of God we want to help train and refresh all those engaging young people across the nation, from church leaders and youth workers through to parents and teachers. We want to help God’s people engage with matters of youth culture and to see the emerging generations won to Jesus.

We will continue to engage some of the toughest subjects that cause challenge to young people and the barriers that may prevent them engaging and belonging to the Church.

We love young people and are dedicated to seeing change in the UK through the work of Jesus through His people.

ABOUT NEWDAY

Newday is one of the largest Christian events for young people that takes place in the UK every year. Young people aged right through their teenage years and on into their early 20s join together from churches up and down the UK and Europe to learn about and worship God, camp out together and soak in the summer festival feeling, leaving Newday further along in their relationship with Jesus.

http://newdaygeneration.org

CONTENT

JOIN THE

CONVERSATION

by wayne parsons

Like many of us, I’ve been trying to work out how to do online youth work with the current new challenges of COVID-19. 9 days ago, my son caught a continuous cough and our household were put on lock down. The next day, I was due to host a youth leaders meeting at our home – which became the first thing I cancelled. 

Day 2 of lockdown. I hosted my first online prayer time with a handful of our young people and a few youth leaders. This was with a group of Year 11 students who were anxious of what this was going to mean for them and their GCSE’s. This was not long before the announcement that schools would be closing and exams would be cancelled.

Throughout that first week, there was a lot of online activity. A number of our young people use Instagram and Facebook so we were engaging with them as much as possible on these. We have a youth page and parents page on Facebook and a youth page on Instagram. I am also in a Year 10 and Year 11 Instagram direct chat, a college age Whatsapp group and have also created an older youth messenger chat for Year 10+. My phone didn’t stop pinging all week. 

On the Thursday night, I launched my first Facebook Live talk on our youth page – this felt so weird! I like talking to people and found speaking to a screen difficult to get into a flow with and I also wasn’t expecting to see people I hadn’t seen for a while join the stream to watch the talk. At our youth group, I can pretty much prepare for the audience I will be speaking to but on Facebook live I quickly realised that we have a lot of young people in the group that haven’t been around for a long time. Seeing these names come up threw me, but was good to know they were hearing some truth and encouragement. We do want to put some more talks out on Facebook and through Instagram Live, so hopefully I will be better prepared next time for who is watching!

“I launched my first Facebook Live talk on our youth page – this felt so weird! I like talking to people and found speaking to a screen difficult to get into a flow with”

I felt we were in good contact with our older youth but was concerned about how to stay connected to our younger youth. We firstly discussed whether we should encourage parents to let younger youth access social media where they wouldn’t normally be allowed to do. Whatsapp has a minimum age of 16yrs, Facebook and Instagram’s is 13yrs. We quickly concluded that this would not be a good idea and didn’t feel with integrity it was right. We then discussed doing a YouTube channel, but didn’t feel we were equipped for this. Even though it could have been helpful to post information and content out, we didn’t feel it would serve us in connecting with the young people. 

Through work and uni meetings over the week, I was introduced to Zoom conference calling. It’s a great resource that has a free basic option for hosting online meetings for up to 100 people. It does not have an age limit to use though under 16’s shouldn’t make an account. I had tried to conference call through messenger and Instagram but was limited on who we could see and how many we could have on a call. I also found out that our church had an upgraded account which allowed you to host calls for longer than 40mins (the limit for a basic account). After familiarising myself with Zoom, I felt that this could be a good platform for connecting with all our young people. 

I then had that lightbulb moment of how all of this would fit in with safeguarding and GDPR. I arranged a meeting with our safeguarding officer and we put together some guidelines for us as a youth work to be following at this time.

Our principles included:

• Model online safety to our young people at all times.

• Keep to church safeguarding policy.

• Abide with online age restrictions.

• Maintain appropriate safeguarding, boundaries and relationships.

• Do not give out your mobile number unless appropriate.

• Dress appropriately when in video calls with young people.

• Choose appropriate locations when using video calls with young people.

• No calls before 9am or after 9.30pm and no messaging after 10pm with young people.

• Keep contact with young people to set times and appropriate durations.

• If you would not do or say it in person, do not do it online.

• Only access online groups with young people where another youth leader is part of the group.

• Always have another youth leader in group video calls with young people.

• Gain parent/guardian permission for adding young people under school Year 11 into a video call.

• One to ones with young people can take place if a mentoring agreement is already in place and parent/guardian permission has been recorded. If this is a new mentoring relationship, a parents/guardian need to fill out a mentoring agreement, giving permission and agreeing an appropriate time and duration.    

• Youth leaders are not to set up groups, chats, video calls or any other online activity without agreeing it with the youth group leader.

Once we had agreed these principles, I felt ready to invite all our young people to our first online meeting. I emailed all our parents using church suite, saying that we would like to run a weekly online youth meeting every Tuesday night. We would run this at the same time as our normal youth night would be. The evening was hosted on Zoom and I sent a link for all parents to set their young people up with. I asked them to get the young people to download the app and at 7pm on Tuesday night to log into the conference call. 

“Once we had agreed these principles, I felt ready to invite all our young people to our first online meeting.”

We hosted our first meeting last night, we began with 10 minutes of games; 5 second rule, mallets mallets word association and guess what was in the bottle. We then did 10 minutes of a creative worship activity; whilst playing a worship song the young people had to list a characteristic of God using every letter of the alphabet. I then did a 10 minute talk using a power point that I had put together on ‘Seeking God’. With Zoom, you can share your screen to the whole group and lead them through power points, share videos, documents etc. We ended with 10 minutes of prayer, asking different young people to lead us in praying for the NHS, vulnerable people, the church, the local community. The meeting was a bit crazy but if you ask young people to mute their microphones when they are not sharing it works quite well. 

Next week, we plan on doing the same altogether 40 minute meeting and then afterwards each small group will have a separate meeting with their group leaders.

• 7pm-7.40pm altogether Zoom meeting.

• 8pm–8.40pm connect groups to meet on Zoom, hosted by various youth leaders. 

This is our online journey so far, I am sure it will keep changing and developing but thought it might be helpful to share as I know many of you are trying to work out how to navigate this new world of online youth work.