Accompaniment I am with you alwaysÖ(Matthew 28:20) In Life • Play. For children and young people, playing is close to praying. Youth love to play and love to play with adults. • Spend time outdoors. Hike, canoe, kayak, go to the beach or to the mountains. Youth love nature and the outdoors. • Travel. Kids like road trips and journeys where they get to be on the move with each other. Turn off the radios and disc players and just talk. • Do stuff. Youth love projects where they can help others, roll up their sleeves, break a sweat together in the service of something larger than themselves. • Ask lots of questions that are open-ended: What do you think aboutÖ? How did you feel aboutÖ? What's it like toÖ? • Find out what their causes are, what they are passionate about. Ask them about that. • Ask them about their dreams for their life. • Be vulnerable with them and talk about your own struggles in ways that are appropriate and helpful to them. • Write letters and personal cards to them. Find out and celebrate their birthdays and other major occasions like graduation and prom. They love the personal touch and attention. • Catch them doing something good. Catch them in their gift and beauty. • Talk about your own adolescence. • Pray for them. Take their pictures and put them on cards to pray with. Put up their pictures in places where they are seen and celebrated for who they are, not just for what they do. In Youth Ministry and Congregational Life • Celebrate them every chance you can. Birthdays, accomplishments, rites of passage. • Advertise and go to their events when you can. • Talk to their parents about how great they are. • Set up an accompaniment process that flows out of and extends their confirmation program till they graduate. • Hire them. • Sponsor elders in the church and other persons of faith to come and talk about their lives and journeys. • Connect them to people in the community who share their interests and passions, their own sense of call. • Apprentice them. Connect them up to people they might learn from.
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