by Manohara Shyam das

I'm using this title because I think it is very meaningful. The web site I visited this week has this name and encourages youth not to be ashamed of spiritual life. This Christian project started in 2002 in Auckland, New Zealand in the Howick Baptist Church, under the care of pastor Andrew Whitehead.

The main communication channel is email; they utilize a very dynamic way of communication that includes devotional thoughts, links to 'cool' web sites, humor, quotes, etc. Just as we do, they have study guides for the bible, specially for young people, and they are planning to write four series of fiction-novels, targeting young teenage girls. (I'm not so sure about this part ...).

On the other hand, Andrew Whitehead tours all the churches under his care twice a month, so he can maintain close relationship with the youth community and get feedback of what's going on.

This a very important point, as we need 1more specialized preachers in our ISKCON movement. (I'm not talking about sannyasis or senior devotees only, but young devotees who are expert in the language, problems, and necessities of young people in this problematic period of life.)

They also invite and inspire young people not only to realize how important spiritual life is, but also to participate actively in preaching. Some make photocopies of emails and distribute them to their friends at school, gaining new subscriptions to the mailing list, per example.

Another important point is that they give importance to the family. Father Whitehead lives as a grihastha, and from that platform he preaches. In this way the youth can see that it is possible to have a spiritual and material life well balanced.

For financial support of their project they create merchandise under the trademark Not Ashamed Youth. This is not new for our movement, but the point is that the articles they sell are targeted at young people exclusively, and the idea is to collect to maintain their own program, without depending on any institution or department.

Finally the motto of this project is: Not Ashamed of Jesus, Not Ashamed of the gospel, and Not Ashamed to live it! If you want to visit their web site, this is the address: www.notashamedyouth.com.