Timings for the day

Meeting in person at Swanwick: 10:15am - 3pm

Meeting online via Teams: 1-3pm

Is there a danger in holding on to our youth programmes too tightly? Can our teams hold sessions lightly enough and discern where the Spirit is at work in the group? Spotting a young person who has prayed aloud for the first time, seeing a young person want to help out in some way or even a young person engaging for the first time in a discussion about God might all be little indicators of the Spirit at work. But what about the young person who seems dissatisfied and is a bit rebellious – by challenging them for their opinion on how to improve something and challenging them to get involved and make a change, we sometimes see God at work in these situations too. So when we do see indicators of the Spirit at work, what can we do about it?

How might we enable our youth work team to reflect in the moment? And do we prioritise Team Time to reflect after our sessions, to learn together and adapt, as we listen to God’s leading? At this coming Learning Community, we want to help each other identify those little signs of the Spirit at work in our own young people and then explore ways to work with our team to help nudge them a little further along their discipleship journey.

We will link this to the learning journey. By spotting signs of the Spirit at work in young people, we may discern that some of them are now ready to go deeper by moving in to the next circle. We then go back to asking ‘what plans or programs’ will help our young people move into the next phase of their discipleship. So we start with where God is at work before planning the programme.