DIGITAL EASTER YOUTH CAMP | NORWAY

Due to the COVID-19 situation, ‘social distance’ became a norm in our life. Unfortunately, the Baptist Union of Norway Youth had to cancel their youth camps during the easter. However, they have decided to try a digital easter camp. So how did it go? Below is a conversation with Kjell who is the new and young youth director for Baptist Union of Norway.

You are the new youth director for Baptist Union of Norway. Tell us more about yourself.

Yes, hi! I am Kjell – pronounced shell! I am a 27-year-old from the capital of Norway, Oslo. I have worked with Youth With A Mission in California before. And I have been working for the Baptist Union of Norway Youth (Ung baptist) and in humanitarian work in recent years. I am finishing my Masters in Education – actually next week! I am so excited to be working for youth and making programs for people to get to know God!

How is the situation now and how is the Ung baptist coping with the situation?

It’s a challenging time to be a church for sure! We’ve had to cancel all of our camps the coming months. Ung Baptist is currently working to aid the local churches in making digital material for messages and discipleship. In addition we’re trying to make digital hangouts and meeting platforms for youth. We’re looking into options of making digital programs for events coming forward. We realised – now more than ever – we have to rely on the digital meeting platforms to give the fellowships normally reserved for church gatherings and camps. One of the things we did this Easter was to make the easter camp digital.

So tell us more about digital easter camp.

We had to cancel four nationwide Easter Camps due to the COVID-19 situation. So we tried to combine the best parts of all of our camps into one digital camp program format. Of course, it could not contain a whole-day program – so we focused on making interactive competitions, prayers, communion and messages as video programs and posted it throughout the Easter week.

So our youth could join alone or with their family from their own home, but still it connected our youth in Norway. In practice, we were able to involve different people from more diverse churches. And we also added humor into our programs such as an easter story played out by different ‘actors’ and doing some parody of ‘newsroom’ telling us about the easter and so on. It brought a lot of laughs and a good time.

Anything else to add?

We are happy that we could at least do something for the time being. Furthermore, the summer camps have been cancelled as well and we are not sure how long the situation will last like this. So we try our best to connect with the youth and do something creative digitally.

Well, I am excited and looking forward to meeting more people in EBF! I think we as a church have a lot of exciting things we can do together in the kingdom of God.