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youth ministry We asked them to think about what they could offer to their community and how they could all support each other in letting their light shine. One pupil really impressed the class (and us too) with a show of Irish dancing skills. It was great to see the form group all cheering on in support of their classmate.
Back to school Ellie Leatherbarrow from the Animate Youth Ministries’ gap-year team reflects on the start of the new academic year – and the adjustment to working back in schools once more. These past 18 months have been quite a whirlwind. At Animate we have had to learn new skills and find a different way of trying to connect with young people, via online ministry. This brought the challenge of not always knowing exactly who you were targeting and whether your efforts would have the same impact as when doing youth ministry in person. I’m now going into my third year on the Animate team. Spending the majority of my first two years in lockdown was tough. Coming back this September has brought a new challenge, though, with the need to reacquaint myself with all of the classroom resources that we’d not
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been able to use for such a long period of time. We have gone from making YouTube videos to now being able to work with youngsters in person once more. And like many, I wondered whether we had forgotten how to speak to people in ‘real life’. We got there in the end, however, and have already had the pleasure of working with a few different schools from the Archdiocese since the autumn term began. It has been good to be reminded of the significant impact that young people have on our lives, and of how they can teach us new things as the world and the youth of today are forever changing. We worked first with the Year 7s from All Hallows in Penwortham, exploring the theme of ‘Let your light shine’.
We also had the opportunity to work with the Year 7 pupils from St John Fisher, Wigan. We explored the theme of ‘Learning together as a community in Christ’, whereby the pupils reflected on being all on this journey together and how they could support people along the way. One of the activities we did was a music quiz, in which you had to guess the name of the song and the artist. Most of the songs were from the 1980s, yet one pupil impressed us by guessing all of the songs correctly after listening carefully to each one … a reminder, perhaps, that life can get easier if we listen to what God wants of us rather than think we know all the answers ourselves! Working with all of these children so far this year has helped me to realise how we all have something different to offer our communities, no matter what that might be, and knowing this I’m looking forward to engaging so much more with the different schools we’ll be working with in the future.
