Youth Ministry update
Well, what a couple of months it’s been for our young people. Thank you for all you’ve done to support and encourage them and me, and for your prayers – keep it up! The pandemic has been a rollercoaster, with schools being closed (seen as positive by some of them!), exams thrown out the window, entertainment and exercise shut down.
Although you’ll have seen me in the online worship songs, that’s been a small part of my time and so much more has gone on behind the scenes. During lockdown, we’ve been staying in touch with our young people through our fantastic hard-working volunteer youth team. We’ve been Zoom-ing, Whatsapp-ing, door-knocking and tea-drinking to keep and build the connections we have. The videos we’ve produced to keep young people full-charged have been viewed 5,000 times!
Over the last few weeks, it’s been great to meet with our teens in the café as they’ve been receiving their A-Level & GCSE results, with a mix of laughter and tears as months of anxiety reached a conclusion. Please keep our young people in your prayers as they move onto the next stage, whether that’s work or starting/returning to university, and join us either online or in-person for our 5pm Student Service on 6 September.
Early Spring seems like a long time ago, but on the Saturday before lockdown we joined with a dozen other churches and nearly 100 young people for Shift, filling St George’s to worship. Despite on-the-day speaker changes and alterations due to the developing coronavirus concerns, it was a Spirit-filled evening – a generation uniting defiantly to celebrate and look to God.
Keep praying for our young people, not just this month but over the coming decade. They will be hardest hit by any economic fallout from COVID-19. We also need more volunteers, as our immediate future as a ministry looks a lot more like small groups and mentoring. If you’ve got both the heart and the time, we can help you with the rest. Without young people, our church has no future. Just email or call, and I will find you a place. Let’s keep investing in young people, listening to them, letting them lead and making them a fully integrated part of our church.