Alpha Youth Series (online) review by Josh Verity

Alpha Youth Series reviewed by Josh Verity, Youth Pastor at Milton Keynes Christian Centre

I want to tell you why you should be using the Youth Alpha resource, especially whilst we’re doing online youth work in the midst of the pandemic.  Pre pandemic & lockdowns we were engaging with 100 to 150 young people each week.  After the first lockdown we were seeing roughly 25-40 young people engage each week with our online youthwork.

We launched our online small groups using the Youth Alpha Series.  Not only is it a completely free resource which means anybody can access it, but secondly they’ve got language subtitles for loads of different languages which means it’s really accessible around the world for all our international friends. It’s designed to be like an on ramp to faith but when you look through the content I found that it’s actually completely applicable to anyone anywhere, regardless of where you are in your faith journey. What Youth Alpha is trying to do is help young people stay connected, which is key, but they are also trying to bring in big topics and provide discussion around them to explore at young peoples own pace. I’ve found exploring doesn’t have a finish line, which means regardless of where you are on the journey there is something that everyone can take away which means it’s relevant to the whole of your youth group.

We launched it by publicising it far and wide and we launched it as an 8 week commitment that our young people could sign up to be a part of and commit to. There are more than 8 sessions if you do them all but we chose 8.  The sign up process was crucial for us, it safeguarded meetings as we knew who should be there from our sign ups register, and secondly it brought greater buy in from our young people, because they knew what they are committing to and are more likely to engage.

We had 50 young people sign up for Youth Alpha and around 40 of those stuck it out and consistently attended.  Youth Alpha is ready made, it’s high quality, and there are a whole load of funny, thought provoking and discussion provoking videos to watch together, there’s volunteer training videos on there, and ready made discussion guides that are ready to go. It takes little to no prep to create, set up and run – all it takes is for you to hit the download button and familiarise yourself with what is there.

On the night, the way we ran it was to send out a zoom link, everybody comes into the meeting, we start pretty sharpish, I screen shared the video from my laptop, everybody watches together and then at the different pause points throughout the video we sent everyone into break out rooms which I already pre assigned, after a set time we bring them back in watch more of the video together then go back into discussion groups. It’s been fantastic, we love to see young people truly treasure Jesus and value Him above all else, for us this has been an important tool to help make that happen and I think you should check it out for your group too!

You can find episode 1 of Alpha Youth on YouTube here

Theres also a new page full of tips and advice on using the resource online
https://alpha.org.uk/alpha-youth-online