Conversation Cards by Fusion Review by Becky Lawrence, Youth and Children’s Worker at St Marks MK, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

 

I am a sucker for these conversation cards as a youth resource tool and i’m building up quite a collection now!  These latest ones in my collection are from Fusion Movement and are created for students/young adults but I thought they’d be suitable for my youth who range from 11 to 18 and they are!  I have a small mixed age youth group and these work with our dynamics, they may not work with a group that is just younger youth – but you may be able to pick and choose some from the deck that would work with your young people.

I purchased two of their decks which included DMC Deck (Deep and Meaningful Comversations) and the Discipleship Deck. They also have a P.R.A.Y Deck but I haven’t bought those yet!

These are great for using with a youth group or for guiding conversation during a 1-2-1 with a young person.  I am keen to use the Discipleship deck to prompt honest chat as I continue 1-2-1’s with my youth leading out of the pandemic.  For me this has been the best chance for meaningful conversation and honest chats about how they are, how they feel and how they are doing emotionally and spiritually.

It can be hard to introduce deep questions and reflection into your youth group expecially if like me it’s been super hard to engage them in discipleship online over the last 18 months.  These cards really helped me to faciliate my youth group to dive into some of the deeper honest questions in a more fun way and they could work for you too!   Using the cards feels a bit less out of the blue than just posing a big question out of thin air – you can introduce the cards and the kind of questions they contain before selecting one to discuss.   You can even get the youth involved to choose a question card or say stop so you can select a card while you shuffle the card stack.  You can then go around the group and everyone have a turn at answering the same question or choose a different card for each person and allow others to contribute to each answer if they’d like to.  If you are going to try to get them all to answer each one It can also really help to choose someone to go first in answering – perhaps one of the older members of the group or a leader so they can set the tone for honest answers – otherwise everyone tends to follow the tone that is set and if someone begins with a silly answer or a not very honest answer everyone will follow suit.

If your youth group is outreach based or a mix of churches and un churched youth, the questions are not overly Christian either and wouldn’t make anyone feel uncomfortable if they didnt have a faith, weren’t a Christian or had another faith.  I think these would be a great way for different young people to share their perspective and open the door for more honest conversations about faith and deep topics.

I’ve also used these type of conversation cards pre pandemic in detached work with youth, as a way to engage youth in conversations.  They would probably work too online with a youth group as an activity or as an icebreaker or closing activity.  Or you might be creative enough to think up a totally different way to use them – i’m sure there are more!

Totally recommend these for any youth leader to have in their toolkit!

The cards are £5 a set from Fusion Movement and you can get them here