As we navigate the challenges of COVID-19 and adapt our service to congregations and communities, many youth ministries are prioritizing support for students and parents. Numerous leaders have already implemented successful strategies to ensure students remain connected to Christ and feel God’s presence during this season. Below are key insights on continuing youth ministry during social distancing and developing a strategic game plan for the quarantine period.
• Prayer: Maintaining a vibrant prayer life is essential, much like the vital services that remain open. During this time, it is crucial to prioritize your personal connection with God while establishing a consistent prayer schedule for your students.
Furthermore, you should provide students with regular opportunities for corporate prayer via online platforms or phone conferences. Utilizing tools such as free conference call lines, Zoom, or direct outreach ensures your ministry remains unified. Ultimately, any game plan lacks impact without the foundation of covering yourself, your students, and your mission in prayer. As you look ahead, consider also post-quarantine ministry planning.
• Meetings: You need to also set up consistent times and ways to meet with the leaders of your ministry. Your team should have been meeting at least once a week to go over how things are going in addition to what is new in the life of your leaders and the students they serve. Whether you were or weren’t hosting consistent team meetings during this season, you have to do this now in order to be as organized as possible when reaching out and planning to impact your students.
You can have these meetings through video on Zoom, FaceTime, BlueJeans or some other video software. You can also have the meeting over the phone, but I think video is best since you can’t see your leaders face-to-face as freely as you would have before.
• Content: During this season, you need to be creating consistent content for your students. You can create Bible studies as if you had your weekly worship times and send them out via YouTube or Vimeo, or even post them to your Facebook group. You can also create a daily devotional for the students to go through on their own. YouVersion has made it easy to do Bible plans with friends, so you and your students could go through a Bible plan during this season. The main point here is to create moments to encourage and push students toward God’s Word. This is also where that team that you have been meeting with can come into play to help you create and manage this content.
• Fun: Our students also need moments of fun, moments to get their minds off of where we are and back on fun. Maybe you can host a video game night when everyone gets on the video conferencing system or online to play games or just chat. Many games allow for group play. Here’s an example of an NBA2K tournament and Fortnite Friday event Elevation YTH set up on Twitch.
• Coordinate: You also need to make sure that you’re coordinating with your senior pastor and what they have been doing or plan to do for the adults of the congregation. There might be plans that you can add value to by identifying ways to engage students with ministry programs or opportunities. For example, many churches will be sending emails, text messages and phone calls to the adults of the congregation. However, what would it look like to have a personal call, or even a robocall, from the youth pastor to the students of the congregation saying that we’re praying for you and your parents? The main point here is that we have to make sure we’re in accord with what the senior pastor has planned to reach the congregation. Yes, teamwork makes the dream work.
• Last, but no way is it least, you need to take care of yourself. Many of us as leaders will find ourselves working more hours from home than we were before the quarantine. However, we need self-care because if we burn out we can’t help anyone else. Find something that you can do for you from reading a good book to finding a good show to watch, working out or just creating something for you. At the end of the day you need to find ways to press the stop button in this season so you can press the play button after you rest. We all need rest.
I am praying for you and I hope this list is helpful, please let me know what you would add. Comment below and share this article with some friends.