update: We have updated our post-secondary strategy.

 

CBOQ Youth has remained focus to be serve, resource and support the local church in seeing youth take their next step towards Jesus and engage with the local church.

When the Hemorrhaging Faith report was released in 2013, CBOQ Youth prayerfully discerned how we could respond to its findings, and to support our youth ministry leaders and our churches. One key area of focus was the transition of high school students to post-secondary studies. With this, we started collaborating with Ambassadors for Christ, InterVarsity and Power 2 Change as well as the Navigators with this mandate: to connect high school graduate to their next faith community before stepping onto campus.

The collaborative initiative first began in 2015 with a 1-day conference called T101 (Transition 101) where together, this group of organizations gathered high school grads and representatives from most of the Ontario public universities. This was a meaningful opportunity for grads to personally connect with upper year students and other grads before arriving at their respective campus. We also provided different resources and tools to help in them in that shift to post-secondary life.

Over the years, this collective working team added other connection portals, including digital connections and reps who would meet personally during campus visits. Moreover, this initiative continued to add resources and hosted Q&A panels for grads to ask their questions to upper-year students.

During this time, we’ve also seen other organizations increase efforts in how they connected grads/frosh to campus ministries, whether through AFC’s Frosh Connexion event, InterVarsity’s bridges from their high school ministries and camps, and P2C’s Next department.

Given all these expanding efforts to continue the mandate of helping high school grads connect to their next faith community, we’ve sensed God directives to closing down this version of T101 as the collective initiative.

Since CBOQ Youth was the primary host of T101 and spearheaded this vision, we want CBOQ churches and youth ministries to know what we will provide going forward as we wrap up the T101 initiative:

  • We will continue to support and champion these other ministries in the work they continue to do.
  • We will be reorganizing our own resources as we continue to help our CBOQ (and other) churches better empower their grads.
  • All the resources at transition101.ca have been moved to cboqyouth.ca/postsecondary. We will also be closing T101’s Facebook page and Instagram account on March 31, 2023.

Ultimately, we as CBOQ Youth are grateful for the collaboration all 5 organizations were able to do together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We recognize our shared ministry work continues in different forms in the future. We thank God that he continues to bridge high school grads to their next faith community through the work of his local church alongside these campus ministries.