[0:11]
for me the three most important things to sort out before you start a youth group is um you want to have people in your church you want to have young people in your church I think who are Keen to see the youth group started um I think you want to have families who are sort of getting that ground swell up off the ground to say okay let's do this let's get this start um you want to have young people who are Keen uh you want to have a little core I don't think the core has to be that big but it's um a bit like church planing you want to have a kind of core group there who are Keen to see this happen so I think that's the first thing is to

[0:42]
have families in your church with young people there already um who are going to form the course so that then they can go on uh tell their friends about it bring their friends along uh spread the word in their own networks uh so to have those kind of families there in church already I think is really important um the second one that I think is really important is to have a vision for the youth group to decide what sort of model you're going to choose to decide where you want the youth group to end up to decide how you want to start um what sort of format you're going to take and

[1:13]
I think the most important thing in that in terms of the vision the model that you're going to choose is how you going to teach the Bible in that space so for us uh it would look quite different to a lot of other youth groups around but for us we have to work that out early on how are we going to teach the Bible we didn't want to just make it a dropin center um where youth come along and just eat and have a good time but we really wanted to teach the teach them the bible teach them the truth of God teach them the gospel uh so for us that was really important to work out how are we going to teach the Bible to these young people so to get that sorted out

[1:44]
early on I think it's really important um and to have that as your kind of DNA moving forward so young people come along to youth knowing they're going to hear the Bible they're going to hear the gospel uh they're going to hear about Jesus every week I think that's really important um the third thing is to have the resources behind it it's really important I think early on for the church to decide together this is something we're passionate about this is something we value we want the youth group to uh to go well we want to put money behind it we want to put resources behind it we want to send leaders and

[2:14]
grow up leaders so they can lead in the youth group so to have those things in place I think is really important and for us as a youth group it was so important for us to get that right because we needed a bus and thankfully you know um God raised up lots of people that were gave towards that project to buy a bus for the Youth Group so we could run that um and we had leaders from our own church and we had leaders from other churches come and help us out too and that formed the resources of the youth group together so to get those three things sorted is really important yeah