Thanks for asking about us, as you can imagine, it's a tricky time.
We were really having a fantastic start to this year as new schools were beginning to engage with us with new lunch clubs and new referrals to our Boost alternative education project. The Covid crisis has obviously stopped all of this which has been a huge blow and so our big prayer at this time is that our schoolswork relationships will stay strong so that in the future we can continue to be involved with them.
All our youth clubs and cafe's have closed but we are gathering with some of these groups online or just keeping in contact with individuals. This is a good way to stay connected to the young people that attend but as you can imagine, some young people struggle to connect in this way and don't wish to engage.
Since the start of the lockdown, we created a couple of rhythms as a team:
We gather together for an online meeting each day at 1.30pm to pray for all the groups and young people that we would have engaged with on that day.
At 4pm, we run a YouTube livestream for young people to watch and chat online with us.
Each day has a different theme (Motivational Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Challenge Wednesdays, Thoughtful Thursdays and Creative Fridays). These aren't highly polished or edited videos, but young people value authenticity and we have a steady trickle of young people watch and comment online.
We also recorded an Easter drama film that we put out on our YouTube channel called The Centurian which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKRyM0s9xQU
This means that over the last month, we have had over 1,500 views and lots of encouraging comments from young people who are tuning in and thinking about the content. In one of our videos, we asked the question 'what is keeping you going during the lockdown' and one young person said 'these video's'. So that was good!
Nationally Youth for Christ are doing something called 'Pray through May', encouraging people to sign up to pray for young people. As a centre we are joining in with this and would love others to join us. You can find out more here: https://yfc.co.uk/praythroughmay/
Obviously, there is a lot of unknown for us at the moment, about when schools go back, when we should reopen our projects and what we should be doing differently in light of everything that is happening. Prayers for wisdom in this would be greatly appreciated!