At AYAC 2023,The voices of the Youths are now being heard, and that’s a huge sigh of relief.
All roads lead to ‘CannanLand’ of The Living Faith Church, for the International Youth Alive convention.(IYAC)
The Annual Youth Alive can be likened to the older sibling of the Easter Youth Alive Convention (EYAC), the latter happening during Easter with considerably lessened ‘buzz’. AYAC is the widely revered Shiloh, but for a largely youthful demographic. It’s summer; schools are on break - students are mostly home.
The theme of this convention was ‘breaking new grounds’ and it was held from August 22-26. Surprisingly, considering the current non-luxurious situation of the country, the turnout was impressive.
Over the years, factoring the ‘family tree’ cadre, of the Living Faith Church (Winners Chapel), Youths haven’t always felt a sufficient degree of ‘inclusion’.
And so for those who have spent all their lives in Winners,and have not been open on trying out other new youth-led churches, have had to savour all of the experiences that their contemporaries in these churches seemingly enjoyed, twice in a year via EYAC and AYAC. These two events for some youths were sadly not enough.
The past 3-5 years has recorded a tenable number of Young Christian migrating to New Churches for a myriad of reasons ranging from untapped creative expressions, to tribal relationships, and just a yearning for a closely knit community - a common denominator among young people, That the colossal structure of the Church(a 50,000 seater auditorium for context) would not be able to provide hard as the Church tried.
But with the proceedings at the just concluded convention, a change has begun and hopefully it is here to stay.
For the first time in a while and probably since inception, Bishop Oyedepo, Founder of The Living Faith Church and Convener of the Youth Alive Convention called for a closed door meeting with Youths to (amongst other things) beef up expectations for this year's convention. The largely spoken consensus was that ‘IYAC 2023 will be different’ and preparations were made accordingly.
Also, Media and communications for the convention took a refreshing perspective and it was obvious that Youths had been given the car keys to sit in the front seat and take a cruise through the roads, while observing all safety precautions. And all of a sudden, the future doesn't seem so distant anymore.
It was comforting to see specialised and thoughtful content garnered for/during the event. Something as random as seeing some members of the Social (media) department walking around in service with mobile devices attached to tripods to capture moments.
Another indicator of immense growth was the segmentation of the workshop sessions, to cover all possible aspects of culture relevant to attendees from education to career to mental health to relationships and much more.
Furthermore, Ministrations during IYAC 2023 were taken a notch higher especially with the choir (that had gotten backlash for lack of originality), this was coupled with a boost in observable technological gymnastics.
Perhaps one succinct instance to summarise this youth-led transformation that’s slowly taking place was speaking to one of the attendees who shared their experience.
According to Her, the idea of switching to any other burgeoning Churches had depleted significantly because of the outcome of IYAC 2023. ‘This is my home and now I know that even more’. That statement is comforting to hear.
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