Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

During our leadership club planning brainstorming meeting we came up with a ton of fun ideas. As you can tell, we have a lot of theme clubs, which the students really enjoy. Sometimes the themes having something to do with current events (i.e. Super Bowl Club, Olympics Club, Prom Club, etc.), other times they have to do with things the kids are into (i.e. Harry Potter Club, Jerk Club), and other times they really don’t have any relevance (i.e. Yellow Club, Bubblewrap Club).

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The Olympics have always been a strong theme in YL. I’ve seen plenty of programs at camp utilize this theme. One of my favorite was “Speed and Power”. Speed was an overweight guy and Power was a super skinny guy. Gotta love that. I remember my first club skit in high school was me running through the crowd with a fake Olympic torch before every club game in a toga. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the Saints pretty much dominated the Cardinals, I’m gonna be rooting for the Saints in the big game.

So this Monday we are going to do Super Bowl club with the Super Bowl being the following weekend. Our plans are posted below. Since we haven’t done the club yet, I won’t make any promises on this one. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you on Twitter, like me, there is a fantastic resource for YL ideas. I’ve been following it for a few months. It was quiet for a little while but has recently been posting some great ideas. I recommend you check it out!

https://twitter.com/younglifeideas

North Carolina may almost be out of the AP top 25 in basketball, but they are near the top in the YL club plan polls!

My friend Hugh sent me their plans for the semester and they are great! I like how they mix up club with some different things like a concert and even doing club at the high school soccer game! Read the rest of this entry »

We just finished being a part of four weekend camps for our area! They were great, the Lord did amazing things. I also recently posted about using cabin time questions at weekend camp.

We require every leader to go through leadership training to be a leader and then we do separate trainings for leading at weekend camps and weeklong summer camp trips. I recently refined our weekend camp leader training packet. I thought I’d share it with you all. Enjoy!

PS… If you have any reflections from the Fall semester, things you learned, things you would never do again, etc. Pass them along! Leave a comment or email me smcgever (at) pv.younglife.org.

I was having an email conversation with my friend Stacy from Santa Barbara about club talks around Christmas.

What do you do around Christmas? Do you just do standard club talks, do you change it up?

I’ve done a few things, here are a couple ideas:

Read Luke 2:1-20

Readers:

Luke 2:1-12 Juan

Luke 2:13-15 Julia

Luke 2:16-20 Vince

Another thing we have done is have an open sharing time for students. I might ask a campaigner kid to be ready to share to get it started. Sometimes you will be amazed what kids have to say. It could end up being a great gift to the leaders.

What have you done around Christmas time for the talk?

I’ve posted Christmas club ideas in the past HERE and HERE.

But I dug up some more stuff too. Enjoy!

I recently spoke at a YL weekend camp. One of the best pieces of YL camp speaking advice I ever received was to plan your cabin time questions before you plan your talk. Obviously you tweak them after you study the scripture and the rest of the talk planning process, but you really want to begin with the end in mind.

Even as a speaker, I feel the most critical part of the gospel proclamation and formation is in the cabin time discussion. I’m sure you have seen miracles happen in front of your eyes in the midst of cabin time, I know I have.

I have posted cabin time questions before here, and below are the ones I recently used. If you are interested in more cabin time type questions you can also look here.

Its not what you think! We didn’t go to the retirement center and do club there (though I have actually done that!)

We did a really fun club based on things old people do. No offense if you are old or enjoy these old people things. Kids dressed up old and we had a great time. The wheelchair races were on the edge of chaos. Be careful!