Infusion

Turning youth into leaders

INFUSION
Helping teenagers develop Christian youth and children's leadership skills
Crusaders
£35 per pack (£25 for registered Crusaders groups) - mail order from Crusaders

Publicly launched on April 2, Infusion is a resource for training teenagers to become leaders in children's and youth groups. The course is designed for young people between the ages of 13 and 19 and is set out in 14 units and three challenges. This should take 12 months to complete, given a weekly time commitment of two to three hours. The course covers practical topics like working safely with children, running activities, teamwork and teaching the Christian faith.

The pack includes the Trainee's Coursebook, an interactive Infusion CD-ROM, the Supervisor's Handbook and a copy of the 'Actual Reality' CD-ROM - a music-based presentation of the Christian faith for teenagers, which I believe has already been reviewed within these pages.

The Trainee's Coursebook is colourful and well laid out, providing information, questions and tasks for the trainee as well as referring them to the CD-ROM where necessary. The Infusion CD-ROM contains lots of extra material including video clips and links to other web sites. The Supervisor's Handbook is not so colourful and basically reproduces the Trainee's Coursebook with a few extra notes at the beginning.

On the whole, it's a very comprehensive and practical training programme for young leaders and I guess a lot of existing leaders would find it helpful too. But I feel there is one very major omission. Nowhere, in either of the books or the CD-ROM, did I find any mention of prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit in the leading of Christian youth groups. It could be assumed that prayer is so central to Christian ministry that there's no need to mention it. However, in a training programme for young leaders, reliance on God's work both in their own lives and in changing the lives of others is so crucial it seems very strange not to mention it. Yes, there is some material on the 'Actual Reality' CD-ROM and the specially written study guide does say, 'If reading the Bible is likened to eating food, then prayer is rather like breathing.' It's therefore doubly surprising that both appear absent from the actual training materials. New youth leaders need to learn to pray, and pray hard, if they want to see lives changed.
Infusion is a useful and practical training course but the need for prayer and reliance on God is a foundational element which, in my opinion, will need to be added by the user in order to make this a fully rounded course.

Mike Parsons,
Youth Worker, Guildford

© Evangelicals Now - June 2003
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