Alison and Jennifer UUA General Assembly '98

Start, Nurture, and Grow a Local Youth Group

Jennifer Harrison, Sienna Baskin, and Alison Purcell

GA logo The UUA's newest youth group met in a conference room at the Hyatt on Friday afternoon. Composed of youth, youth leaders, Ministers of Religious Education, Parish Ministers, and others, Jennifer, Sienna, and Alison led us through a typical first meeting of a youth group.

 We did many of the following exercises, typical of getting started with a youth group:

 

  1. Get the word out—generate excitement about the group. Possible methods include mounting posters and advertising your group. Make sure the word gets out to the whole church community and the wider community.

    2.  

  2. Ingathering—This can be done as a group activity as well. Good start out events are the kinds of things you can pick up and then put them down and ones that allow as much interaction as people want.

    3.  

  3. Get the sense of the group—how many people are here for the first time—how many are at their first youth group meeting. These are opportunities to get people involved. We used a chalice lighting in our Friday afternoon "youth group."

    4.  

  4. Do an ice breaker—Some interaction but nothing too threatening or personal, a good task-oriented bonding activity. Make sure to pick a fun activity. We did "the shoe game," a mixer that involves finding pairs of shoes and returning them to their owners.
  5. Brainstorming—come up with possible ideas for the youth group. Youth group activities fall into five main categories, and it's good to have activities in all five as the year goes along. These are the five components of a blanced youth group. Some of these activities are easier to set up than others, and some are more appropriate at the beginning of the youth group and others require a group that's got more cohesiveness:

    6.  
    1. SOCIAL ACTION
    2. LEADERSHIP
    3. COMMUNITY
    4. LEARNING
    5. WORSHIP

Here are the activities we came up with in each category:

Now get the group to refine the list, using things like sticky notes or rank the top three activities, just to get a sense of what's on the list. Then figure out what the group can actually do. Will some of these need to be broken down into smaller tasks? Delegate and see whether people want to make things happen. If no one wants to pick up a task, then what does that tell everyone about what the group wants to do? Remember, the goal here is to empower youth.

 If you have older or more leadership-oriented youth, you can do a steering committee.

Adults: Remember also to let the youth facilitate the process. You are the adult; you have power. If you give that power away, other leaders will arise and will see that the model of having power is to empower others. Let them work out their own problems in the group.

There are five useful processes in a youth group that form part of the community-building process:

 

  1. Bonding
  2. Opening up
  3. Affirming
  4. Stretching—This can hurt, but it can also get you and the group further than you thought you were going to go.
  5. Deeper sharing—This is what makes the whole experience so wonderful.

    6.  

Ground rules for making the Youth group work include trust and confidentiality. The group has to make the ground rules, but adults need to be involved personally for this to work.

Troubleshooting—The Youth Office is there to help. Here are a couple of examples:

What if you have to integrate different "slices" of youth group—for example, what if there were an 11th and 12th grade group and an 8th and 9th grade group coming in. Particularly, what can you do when the the 8th/9th grade group is very engaged but the 11th/12th grade group is at odds with the rest of the church?

How do you deal with a situation like that? How do you troubleshoot a youth group situation? Ask questions like: What are the roots of this kind of behavior? Can the community build ground rules? What does the group want to be? What does it want its relationship to the church to be?

A common problem is that the youth group is off in orbit by itself without a larger relationship with the congregation. How do you build that relationship and get the youth to build that relationship? The convenanting process can be really important here. If the convenant doesn't pan out, revisit it as an exercise. The group needs to own its own process. If it doesn't do anything, that's OK. What it does is its own issue.

 How to make a youth-friendly congregation:
(Reported and formatted by Jordan Young)
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