Tag Archives: youth

Ready to leave high school behind but not ready to jump straight into further study or work? With one in four Australians choosing to take a gap year, Trinity College Queensland’s Activate program provides a challenging new option for Christians. Dianne Jensen reports. Trinity College Queensland Activate coordinator Simon Gomersall has developed an innovative three-days-a-week gap year program aimed at ...

For the last nine years a group of 20 or so high-school-aged girls have come together once a week in the small town of Chinchilla on the Darling Downs to do something counter-cultural—take part in a Bible study. Dianne Jensen reports. Girls of Grace is a Chinchilla Uniting Church initiative pioneered by Pastor Tanya Errey. The small group who first ...

If you look around your congregation you might notice a lack of young faces lining the pews but is regular church attendance really necessary for a child’s faith and what can we do to make it a more welcoming atmosphere? Rev Linda Hanson offers her thoughts. Yes, but … regular church attendance for children, as it is for people of ...

What do you get when you add over 170 energy-filled young people with games, worship and minimal sleep? The answer is Easter Madness 2017. Ben Tupou reports. A week before Easter, young people from across the state gathered at the Sunshine Coast Recreational Centre to worship, express their creativity, and learn more about God and faith in today’s society. An ...

The youth will inherit the future but they are also a vital part of the present. Have our churches done enough to meaningfully transition leadership and responsibility from one generation to the next? Scott Guyatt writes. “Young people are the future of the church,” as the saying goes. Sometimes the implication is that we have to get the youth involved ...

When we use the term “youth”, to whom are we really referring? I’ve had discussions with people in the church who would consider those under 40 as “youth”, others seem to think the under 20 brigade best fits the term. For what it’s worth the United Nations defines “youth” as those persons between the ages of 15 and 24. Whatever ...

This year’s Yurora National Christian Youth Convention saw hundreds of young people travel to Stanwell Tops, NSW for a week of worship, workshops and more. Ben Tupou reports. A triennial event held by the Uniting Church, the youth convention hosted delegates aged 16 to 25 from around Australia and at least six different countries worldwide. Yurora 2017’s purpose was to ...

Nyaluak Leth talks to Dianne Jensen about the hopes and challenges facing the new generation of South Sudanese Christians growing up in Australia. Nyaluak Leth remembers holding her father’s hand as they walked to the train station on their way to St David’s Uniting Church, Coopers Plains in Brisbane. The 19-year-old student was only five when she arrived from Egypt ...

After 40 years of running day camps, it’s clear that the folk at Redlands Uniting churches just love going bush. Journey ventured down the dirt roads of a campsite south of Brisbane to find out why everyone keeps coming back. It’s easy to see the attraction of the Karingal Scout Campsite at Mt Cotton, the site of the Redlands day ...

In this exclusive column for The Scoop, Scott Guyatt explores faith on the home front and how families can practice and express their faith outside a church setting. So the evidence seems pretty strong, and multiple studies suggest the same thing: children and young people learn faith best at home. What happens in the family context is the biggest factor ...