Together Apart: Series 2, youth resource review by Olly Shaw, Youth Worker, St. Leonard’s, Eynsham, Oxfordshire.

 

Together Apart series 2 is a 7 part session discipleship resource created by Youthscape to be used online or in person. Unsurprisingly, given the name, these sessions are a part 2 follow on from the first set of pandemic discipleship resources Youthscape made, however you don’t have to have done series 1 for these sessions to make sense.

In fact, from my experience, you don’t even have to do all the sessions or do them in any particular order!   In our youth ministry we have picked a few sessions to supplement some of the our own in house small group plans and these have worked really well.  We’ve been doing our small groups back in person now and this material has worked well in that context.

On a first glance the plans can look a little overcomplicated/overwhelming but once you get used to the format the plans are pretty easy to just pick up and use. The mix between a game, story, video, discussion about a Bible passage and a personal challenge has worked really well for our youth during the sessions.

Our small group sessions (during covid restrictions) usually last around an hour, to an hour and 15minutes and there is more than enough material to cover that time. On the ‘Justice’ session we have actually decided to split the session in 2 to give enough time to do justice(!) to the ‘challenge’ section.

The run of sessions is:

SESSION ONE – worship
SESSION TWO – prayer
SESSION THREE – family
SESSION FOUR – power
SESSION FIVE – justice
SESSION SIX – evangelism
SESSION SEVEN – creativity

Each session has an accompanying video to go along with it.  The videos are around 5-8minutes long and links to the videos are included in the downloadable plan. True to form from a Youthscape resource the plans and videos are really well made and seem to resonate well with our young people.  I was slightly nervous, given JK Rowling’s popularity ratings amongst my young people at the moment, that the ‘Family’ session centred partly around Harry Potter fandom.  However, I trusted the plan, went with it and it seemed to go well.

The session plans are free and available to download here: https://www.youthscape.co.uk/store/product/together-apart-2

You can also see the videos trailer on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ5XJulyx8M

If you looking for some small group plans or a youth group plan that you can just pick up and use without having to adapt too much, then these are a pretty good choice in my opinion.  Totally recommend for online or in person youth work.