Engaging Your Youth Group with the Gift of Prophecy During Covid-19
Helping young people engage with hearing from God can be tricky at the best of times!
Here are a few ideas and tips for how you can make it a normal part of your youth group during the Covid-19 lockdown.
1. KEEP TALKING
It’s tempting to focus solely on the numbers we have on our new youth group Zoom calls and forget to prioritise helping our young people to grow. Keeping hold of the gift of prophecy as a topic of conversation is a great way to avoid simply wrapping your young people in cotton wool. After all, I’m sure you’ll agree that when you look back on you own walk with God, it’s during the times of uncertainty and suffering that you grew the most.
What happens if we see this as an opportunity for each of our young people to go further in their faith? What if this is the time we’ve been waiting for that they will take ownership of their faith and really engage with Jesus themselves?
So, let’s keep talking about this stuff. Let’s keep reminding one another of the significance that Jesus is not dead but alive, and that he speaks today. Let’s keep pushing our young people to lean into his still small voice in this season. Let’s pray and hope for more than faith ‘scraping through’ but instead let’s pray and hope for thriving and growth.
Action: Choose a week to spend some time digging into the gift of prophecy in your group. Or, you could allocate five minutes each time to listen to God. Leave space for people to share anything they feel like God is saying. You could ask some of your volunteers or some of the more mature youth to volunteer to share so that you’re not left with complete silence!
2. EXPLAIN
1 Corinthians 14:1–3 says: ‘Follow the way of love and eagerly desire the gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy. For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to people but to God. Indeed, no one understands them; they utter mysteries by the Spirit. But the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort.’
If there is one thing we could all do with right now, it’s strengthening, encouraging and comfort. This is what the gift of prophecy is all about. You’re not trying to speak prophecy about when this is all going to be over, but we are seeking the words of God’s comfort in this time and this place.
When we explain in simple terms, like Paul does in 1 Corinthians, what prophecy is and what it’s not, it makes it much easier for young people to engage with it and helps bust any myths they may have heard and started to believe.
Action: Choose a few Bible verses around prophecy and read them together in your group sessions. Post them where everyone can see them. Ask everyone to reflect on them and then foster discussion about what this might mean for us all in this season. You could even try a Q&A around the prophetic. Communicating through a screen rather than in person can combat some of our inhibitions, so you might even get some openness and vulnerability you weren’t expecting!
3. EXPECT MORE
The gift of prophecy isn’t just something to talk about, it’s something we have to practice and use. To do this we need to create space where young people are allowed to get stuck in. Times of ministry where we wait together on the Holy Spirit are important and they can be really powerful, but there can be a danger of building a divide between the person who leads the ministry time and those who receive. If we’re not careful and we hold too fast to this model we can create a culture where the leader hears from God for everyone else. Instead, let’s empower our youth groups so that young people are equipped to hear from God from themselves.
Bill Johnson, Senior Pastor at Bethel Church, reminds us: ‘There’s no junior Holy Spirit.’ Let’s be expectant that our young people will hear from God for their friends and family and that they will be a voice of hope during this time.
Action: Create a sense of expectancy in your group for hearing from God. Why not ask a couple of young people to take a week each to pray and ask God for words of encouragement for the group? Get them to share these words during your sessions. You could even ask for them to volunteer and make a rota! Make sure you steward the vision in your group. If you get excited and passionate about this, then your young people will too!
4. BE CREATIVE
We should expect our creator God to speak to us in creative ways. Let your young people think outside the box when it comes to hearing from God. Each of us will hear from him in a different way – whether we’re left-field creative or structured and analytical. God can speak to anyone!
So, think about how you can encourage your youth group to hear from God in different ways. Here are some ideas:
Object Prophecy: Ask each young person to look around the room they are sitting in. This is extra fun at the moment because everyone is in a different room! Get them to ask God to draw them to an object in the room and speak to them through it. They then show everyone what the object is and what they felt God say to them through it. For example, I might be struck by a scented candle on my table and show it to everyone and share that I felt God say that during this time our light might feel small, like a wick of a candle rather than a bonfire, but actually the candle gives off a beautiful smell and it’ll be by our scent or the way we do things that people will see (or smell) Jesus in us.
Pick a Person: Ask for a volunteer. Get everyone else to pray and ask God to speak to them for that person. Then ask everyone to share what they heard and ask the person who was being prophesied over to share whether anything resonates with them in particular. Notice if there are any themes in the prophetic words, and make sure to thank everyone after they share.
Blindfold Prophecy: Sometimes it can seem harder to listen to God for yourself than for others, so this exercise gets people to listen to God for themselves without realising it! Tell the group that you’ve chosen someone in your head that they are asking God to speak to them about. Tell them that it’s fine that they don’t know, because God does. When you have given them some time, and they have heard something, tell them that this word is for themselves. See if anyone found that it was relevant!
For each of these exercises, set some ground rules. For example, refer to 1 Corinthians 14 to remind your group that prophecy should always be encouraging, comforting and strengthening, and that we always leave people to go and weigh the words for themselves.
5. ENCOURAGE
When you’re just learning how to listen to God, it can seem daunting and scary. Make sure that all of this is done with great encouragement. Let your group know that it’s not a failure if they don’t hear anything straight away.
Encourage your young people by reminding them that God speaks in loads of different ways and that he does want to speak to all of us!
Action: Give your group a few different options for listening to God over the week. These could be through scripture, using an object, through writing down their dreams or even by sitting in nature and asking God to speak. Send an encouragement every day to help your group to keep going and growing in this area!
We’d love to hear your experiences exploring vulnerability with your youth group! Send us an email or come along to one of our online youth leader gatherings.
Check out our dedicated Covid-19 page to find out more.