Make your own “Message to my teenage self…” video series idea by Becky Lawrence

January 28, 2021

Make your own “Message to my Teenage self…” video series idea by Becky Lawrence, Youth and Childrens worker at St Marks MK.

I don’t know about you but this term we had to mix things up in terms of what we were offering our youth, to be able to continue to best meet their needs and where they were at. With another national lockdown starting in early Jan we knew all of our youth were going to be at home instead of school and the announcement of possibly cancelled but definitely different exams, there were a lot of changes and extra worries afoot amongst our youth. We realised a midweek youth zoom just wasn’t going to work for our youth in the midst of being on a laptop in virtual classrooms all day doing home schooling, and we also realised they were going to benefit from extra support from us this half term. So we decided to change our whole program!

This term, we’ve changed the day of our online youth sessions to a Sunday evening to give our youth something to look forward to on the weekend. We’re also offering a more varied selection as we realise there isn’t a one size that fits all – that will work with our group especially at the moment in the context we are all in with the pandemic. We’re doing 3 Sunday eve online youth hangouts before half term in February, as well as making Bible reading tips & notes for youth available on our website, offering 1-2-1’s to youth that want it for extra support as a walk or Zoom (with safeguarding & pandemic risk mitigations), sending a weekly encouragement in the form of a short video and we’ve given each of our youth a set of Connect Cards each (see our other review on these!) to inspire ways to connect with God at home. We also gave our young people a St Marks youth branded hoody as a Christmas present from us so that they could ‘feel together apart’ – those went down even better than expected!

One of my favourite parts of this term’s new offering to our youth is the weekly short video, that’s what i’d like to recommend as an idea in this post. It’s a video series we’ve started making & releasing a weekly episode called “Message to my Teenage Self…” I’ve personally invited different adults from our church village to record themselves sharing encouragements to their teenage selves. I think youth really benefit from seeing and hearing the impact of faith and God at work in the lives of real people – and even better from people they know and might already look up to.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing and as adults we’ve learnt a lot about God, ourselves and life since being teenagers ourselves. We’ve all had different life experiences but we all share common emotions. Our hope is that some of the encouragement and messages shared will also be relevant to where our young people have been at or will be and that they will be able to resonate with how some of us felt as young people. By being honest about how we felt as young people and sharing about our own faith journeys, I hope we will inspire them to appreciate themselves, stick with and explore their own faith in God and be more emotionally resilient. At the same time it shares some new faces, perpectives and stories to our youth from across the church, enabling more people to be involved remotely from afar in the lives of our youth and contribute to their faith journeys.

We plan to post these videos weekly on our existing youth Whatsapp chat group, the videos with permission to be public will also be available publicly on our church Youtube channel. (Those that don’t have permission to be public will be ‘unlisted’ on Youtube and only accessible via direct link.) Practically i’m asking the adults to send me the raw footage which I will then edit & format to look the same and add a royalty free backing track too using IMovie, which is a free Apple editing software before exporting as .mov files. (For royalty free music we have a subscription to Storyblocks audio). So far i’ve managed to rope in a few people to be involved and record a video, the concept has so far seemed exciting and feasible to people. Some volunteers have said it has also had the added benefit of being useful & therapeutic for them too to think about what they’ve learnt, how they’ve grown, what God has done and what’s changed since they were a teenager! Our youth have also loved the first couple of videos.

I really recommend this as a creative suggestion for your youth and as a way of involving more adults from your church inputting in the discipleship of your young people. If you don’t have the techy skills or equipment to edit or do this as video recordings you could do this idea in multiple other formats:

Have the adults write a letter to their teenage self and make copies available to your youth either printed as a collection of letters dropped through their doors/sent in the post or available online/emailed.
Have the adult sharing or reading their message live on a Zoom call (or other online platform) to your youth group.
Record the audio of the adult reading their message to their teenage self (most smart phones have the ability to record audio) you could then play the audio message on a Zoom call or send it digitally to your young people via email/text/ or Whatsapp.
or there are probably other ideas I havent thought of that you might have the inspiration to create that works in your context!

If you’d like to view any of our ‘Message to my teenage self…’ series to get a feel for the idea you can find them on our St Marks Youtube channel here