ELAM Youth Group

How We Started

The youth ministries initiative was formed by young members of East London Anglican Ministries who had spent 12 weeks together in a Confirmation class, which, as it turned out, also included re-affirmations of faith, and reception into the Anglican Community.

The members of this Confirmation group, who met on Tuesdays for 12 weeks, decided that they wanted to continue meeting on a weekly basis. This eventually evolved into the ELAM Youth Group. We continue to meet every Tuesday evening from 7 to 9 p.m.

Who We Are

Youth are usually high school age, although some of us stay on beyond high school.

What We Do

We enjoy fellowship and fun each meeting. We begin our evenings with a worship service, and then gather for Biblical lessons and games that encorporate life experiences and moral and spiritual exploration and learning. Activities have included trivia nights, movie night, bowling, pool, baking, campfires, talks, and water fights.

We are also looking for ways to connect with the rest of the congregation and the community through outreach and inreach projects. We rented a dunk tank for a parish picnic. We also hosted Canada Day celebrations with an outdoor service and fireworks. Money raised from popcorn sales during the presentation at the church of Michael Moore's documentary Sicko was given to London-Fanshawe Member of the Provincial Parliament Irene Mathyssen for a community project she felt could use it.

Currently, our major project is working with the Social Justice Steering Team to support the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign, which aids women in Africa who are raising grandchildren orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. Prior to that, the major project was to transform the Family Room into a sitting room with soft furniture.

One really big project was to make a video of our own version of the Nativity story. It's called Full of Grace: The Nativity in 2008 and you can view it on Dailymotion.com by clicking here. It was also posted on Generation, the website for young Canadian Anglicans. Here's what Frank, the writer/director/producer, had to say about the video:

"Our Youth Group at ELAM (East London Anglican Ministries) had been wanting to do some sort of proper Christmas play for the people of our Church, but we wanted to do something a bit different.

Since I have a hobby for writing/directing/producing films and plays and the like, I thought this would be a fun project for everyone to be involved with.

This was the first film that I had written which actually got onto the screen, which is very exciting for me.

I feel that Christians have a tendancy to over-spiritualize some things in the Bible, and perhaps this could be counteracted by showing Biblical events in a modern context. I tried to be as close to the Holy Scriptures, while taking a few liberties to show some other sides of the story. All in all, I think everyone really, really enjoyed the project, me especially, and in the future we hope to do bigger and better productions."