Craigieburn is full of youth and kids! A younger demographic with many cultures and religions in 3064. Please pray with us for the youth at our church, faith and strength to stand as Christ’s and grow in His love. And
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One moment.
Pray
What to pray for young people, and for those alongside them.
On the last national count, 25.5 per cent of Australian churches had no teenagers involved in anything they do (NCLS Operations Survey, 2016). That is not a problem a strategy solves on its own. This page is what we ask God for, written down, so that you can ask with us.
Why this page exists
The work belongs to God before it belongs to us.
Youth ministry in Australia has a structural problem. Most roles are part-time, the people who become good at the work leave it for something that pays a wage, and the churches that lose them often do not replace them. None of that happened by accident, and none of it is permanent. It was built, and it can be rebuilt.
Youth Ministry Futures works on the rebuilding, through four programs that train and sustain youth ministers and a church partnership that places them. That work is real. It is also not the thing that changes a young person. God does that.
So what follows is not a list of outcomes to secure. It is four groups of people to bring before him: young people, the groups and churches they belong to, the adults around them, and those who do this as their work.
Four areas
Four groups of people to bring before him.
01
Young people
Much of what a teenager carries is invisible to the adults nearby. Pray for those who belong nowhere in particular, that they would be welcomed somewhere and know it; for those who have left the church, or left the faith, that Jesus would draw them back; for the ones sitting exams, that they would know their worth is not what the results say it is; for young people carrying poor mental health, bullying or poverty, that the right people would be near them; and for Christian teenagers holding their faith in front of friends who do not share it, for perseverance, grace, and joy.
02
Youth groups, and the churches that hold them
A youth group can be a small and fragile thing: a few volunteers, a room, and a night of the week competing with everything else in a teenager’s calendar. Pray for groups where a young person is known rather than counted; for safety, physical and emotional and spiritual, and for leaders with the wisdom to build it; for clarity about Jesus in every talk, every study, and every conversation on the way out the door; and for churches with no young people at all, that they would keep praying for them and keep making room.
03
The adults around them
Faith is mostly caught from someone a young person already trusts. Pray for parents and carers, to be sustained through the ordinary difficulty of raising adolescents; for grandparents praying for children and grandchildren who do not know the Lord; for adults in churches to be worth imitating, and to make room for what young people bring; for teachers, chaplains and counsellors, to have wisdom for conversations that matter more than they appear to; and for volunteer leaders, who fit this around work and family and are rarely told that it mattered.
04
The people who do this as their work
Pray for youth ministers to lead with integrity, and to be held in their own faith while they carry other people’s; for those training now, in Pipeline and at Bible college and in churches that took a chance on them; for part-time workers holding ministry alongside another job; for those serving where resources are thin and encouragement is rare; for the tired and the burnt out, that they would be given rest rather than simply replaced; and that God would raise up people who will stay in this work for a long time, and churches able to keep them.
Prayer wall
Pray for what others have shared.
Read slowly. Pray as you go.
For each church to have access to well trained youth ministers and to set aside funds for this
[Church] to raise up and send out well equipped youth leaders
Prayer request
Would you like us to pray or have the Fellowship pray with you.
Each November
We pray for this together for a month.
Month of Prayer is YMF’s national month of prayer for young people and the leaders who serve them. It is open to anyone who wants to take part.