Building Collaborative Youth Ministry

Testimonial by James Ezoah, Youth For Christ, Ghana Coast

I was struggling with youth work till I had the privilege to attend CONVERGE. My struggles stemmed from the fact that I worked alone as the YFC coordinator in central region. I never partnered with any other youth organization and most importantly, there was no youth ministry network where I could fellowship and learn from other peers.

Having had the privilege of being part of Converge, I got exposed to other youth ministries within the Converge network which led to some strategic partnerships and collaboration. This brought tremendous encouragement to my ministry as YFC coordinator in central region and revitalized our ministry outreaches. I have since partnered with Onehope, Alpha Ghana, NexGen, Church of Pentecost, Awana among other Ministries.

Learning Experiences 

  • Learning that we cannot do the ministry alone and we needed to come together as youth worker has been a tremendous eye opener.
  • I hadn’t acquired my knowledge on youth ministry, however, Converge meetings have really open my horizon on youth ministry.
  • The fellowship at Converge meetings has enabled me to understudy other colleagues in youth ministry

Partnership benefits 

  • Bible Society of Ghana, Bible League, Youth Alpha helped us to supply 2,159 Bibles to Upper Primary, Junior High, Senior High and Church Youth.
  • OneHope assisted us with 1400 Explorers. We were able supply churches, schools and clubs.
  • International Christian Youth works(ICY) has organized several training here in Ghana for youth leaders through partnership.
  • By God’s grace the Nzemaland was opened to ICY to train more churches because of the transformational testimonies among the youth.
  • We trained 1200 young leaders through NEXGEN.

Media

  • Cape F.M gave us the opportunity to be on air two times(one hour each) in a week to matters concerning the youth.
  • Coastal Television has given us same opportunity in Cape Coast.

Training National Youth Leaders

Testimonial by Chudruu and Munkhbayar Batsuren, Mongolian EA Youth Commission


Between 2016 and 2019, Mongolian Evangelical Alliance Youth ministry team worked with Converge leaders including Colin Piper, Sasha Kim, Bob Moffett and Alvan Tauli, to organise 10 training on “Call to Serve the Youth” to provide leadership skills to more than 400 young people, which contributed to the creation of the Christian Youth Platform Nationwide. Initially, the plan was reaching 300 participants.  

Peer Mentoring

Adrian Blenkinsop, OneHope, Australia

Converge Oceania is an exciting relational group of youth workers across the region connecting very practically and regularly to support one another and collaborate together.

For more ideas of how Converge works in the region visit the Facebook group Converge Oceania and for an example of their productivity see the literature review linked below.

Raising a Generation of Digital Evangelists

Testimonial by Rodney Devdas, Children Bible Ministry, India

The Digital Academy (DA) held in 2019 in Pune was a big blessing for me and my ministry among the children. I attended the training with two of my teenage team members. The reason why I say DA was blessing to me because when it comes to technology I find it very hard to understand the technical terms and fine nuances of it. I was total nerd at this. But the good thing about the DA was that the facilitating team broke down the training language to very simple form which was very easy to understand, learn and implement. Another aspect that I liked was that the Trainers gave ample time to the participants to work on their assignments. Which i think was highlight as the participants got time to use the teaching and rectify it as well. DA also gave me confidence to work on digital platform.

After coming back from DA I started a Youtube channel called CHILDREN BIBLE RESOURCES where in we upload worship and teaching videos. The training that we took in DA was very helpful in conducting 6 day CHILDREN’S BIBLE CAMP ONLINE in the month of May, 2020. This camp was attended by about 10000 children from India and neighbouring countries. It was a huge success and big thank you to DA for this as what we learnt in DA we used in making Online Camp. The camp had about 22 people across India teaching in it and we used the DA notes and experience in helping the team shoot videos for camp. All our videos in the camp was shot on mobile phone and in our homes. Except the editor none are from Media background. When people saw the videos of camp most of them thought that we have used expensive cameras, lights etc. We continued with several programs on Youtube after our camp and it inspired many other organisation to come up with online programs for children. We are even helping other mission organisation to set up Online Sunday School.

Thank you DA and CLFA.