All NexGen Pro articles – Page 72
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BlogMeeting guides 3: Live humbly
Meeting aim: To reflect on God’s call to be just and not act according to our own interests.
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BlogMeeting guide 2: The Good Samaritan
Meeting aim: To reflect on the commandment to love your neighbour and think through what that means for our lives.
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Faith at homePushy parenting
Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield recently suggested that parents in the North of England should become ‘pushier’ in order to help their teenagers get better exam results. The Commissioner’s Growing up North research found that school leavers from London and the South-East are more likely to go to competitive universities than those in the North. Care for the Family’s Katharine Hill responds:
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IssuesWhat do you do when the parents want you out?
What do dogs, Indian food and parents have in common? They can all be your best friend, until they turn around and bite you. Managing your relationship with the parents of the children and young people in your group can be one of the trickiest tasks involved in ministry. Yet it’s also one of the areas we probably least prepare youth and children’s leaders for, whether they’re employed or volunteers. Parents can be your most important partners, particularly in the nurture of young people’s faith; parents can also be the most powerful obstruction to the success of your work. Investing time in them is an important part of your job which simply can’t be deprioritised or overlooked.
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IssuesThe Lab: Pursuing relationships
Relationships are the bread and butter of youth work. They are the key ingredient on which the rest of our youth work activities are built. Relationships are central to all our lives; through relationships we learn the social skills that help us navigate the world around us. In youth work, we turn this relationship-building into a professional skill. Young people who have positive and trusted relationships with significant adults have been shown to do better in school, have better mental health and be less involved with risk-taking behaviours.
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IssuesWhat are young people seeking help for?
Childline is a free private and confidential service helping anyone under 19 in the UK with any issue they’re going through. It was started in 1986 by Esther Rantzen and joined the NSPCC in 2006 in order to help reach more young people. In 2015-16, Childline carried out more than 300,000 counselling sessions, with 71 per cent of those taking place online.
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Faith at homeForming faith rituals: Shabbat
We’ve been celebrating Shabbat as a family each Friday for the past nine years. We love it, and couldn’t imagine our week without it. If you’ve not come across Shabbat, it’s a Jewish ritual, a Friday night meal with prayers and blessings. Our two children, aged 4 and 5, join in with the songs, the actions and some of the Bible verses we say. We’ve shared it with lots of different people, Christian and otherwise, and we’ve adapted it as we’ve gone along to keep it accessible and relevant to everyone present.
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Issues
Schools’ work: Emotional resilience
Dream: think strategically and with vision about our work in schools.
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Faith at homeA story for home: Elijah meets with God
Here is a story for you to tell at home, perhaps at bedtime or part of a God-time during your day. Enjoy pulling the different faces and making the sound effects together. You could also use this story during a children’s session, using the actions as they are written here, with everyone sitting down, or making the actions bigger, standing and / or walking around the room as you do them.
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IssuesQ&A: Father Dominic Howarth
The Catholic Youth Ministry Federation of England and Wales’ (CYMFed) Flame congress is the largest Catholic youth event in the UK. Building on two previous congresses, Flame 2017 will gather thousands of young people from across the UK in Wembley’s SEE arena on 11th March. Deputy editor Ruth Jackson caught up with Father Dominic Howarth, one of the event’s organisers
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IssuesOfsted downgrades Christian schools
Recently, Ofsted inspected ten independent Christian schools, nine of which were downgraded from their previous reports. All ten were linked to Christian Education Europe (CEE), an evangelical group which links 30 such schools and makes use of the Accelerated Christian Education system, developed in the USA but used here for many years. It offers an alternative to the national curriculum based on Christian principles. Ofsted’s previous assessment was clearly more positive but their recent visits led to critical reports and have brought such expressions of faith schools into question.
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IssuesLack of support for young carers
Awareness of the UK’s 700,000 young carers in the UK has grown considerably in recent years. A report by the Children’s Commissioner highlighted the plight of the 130,000 carers who are not known to their local council, and an even greater number not getting the support they need.
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Faith at homeBuilding Resilience: Getting through the day
Being a child or young person is tough. Working with and parenting children and young people is tough. Liz edge asks, how do we build resilience in our young people, and in ourselves?
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IssuesYouth and Children’s Ministry Training: Beyond the classroom
We all know that training is a hugely important step on our journey of working with children and young people. Whether it’s part-time, full-time, a few days, numerous years, distance learning or residential, there are lots of valuable lessons to learn through training: safeguarding, community learning, education, child development, communication skills and applied theology, to name but a few. But there are also important lessons to be learned that aren’t always gleaned through a conventional classroom environment - lessons about friendship, compassion, innovation, resilience, understanding and worship.
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IssuesGardner’s World: The art of sobbing
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that you can’t lead a young person to a place you’ve never been yourself. It’s one of those things we know intuitively - no one needs to tell us that if we want the young people we serve among to grow we’ve got to be in the business of growing too. But crying? Do we need to go there too to be effective youth and children’s workers?
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IssuesReal Life: “I lead young people who are the same age as me”
I went to a small Christian school from year six to year eleven; there were only 18 pupils in my whole year! In the months leading up to our GCSEs, the teachers encouraged us to look at where we wanted to study next. We wrote CVs, checked out dates for open days and applied for college. I had been to three open days and although it was fun, it wasn’t how I wanted to spend the next two years. College was too big compared to the small school I had grown up in, and I couldn’t find four subjects that interested me.
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IssuesEditorial - February 2017
It’s funny how a phrase can move so quickly from ‘never heard of it’ to ‘everyone using all of the time’. As a young person I was proudly one of the first to be able to do that weird clicking thing with my fingers while saying: “Booyakasha”, and obviously would always answer my phone with the most hearty, “Wasssssssuuuuuup!” I could muster. God bless Ali G and Budweiser.
