Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

I received a goldmine of Wyldlife club ideas from Ryan Weston, Area Director in Western Prince William, Virginia. As Ryan told me, these clubs are mixer heavy, which is a huge help for WL. For any WL teams out there that don’t have their clubs planned out for the rest of the semester, I’d suggest just taking some of these and running with them. This will allow you to focus on contact work, one-on-ones, campaigners and so much more. This is a huge help from Ryan, thanks!

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Ok, the real name of this club is “poop” club, but I just couldn’t allow myself to title the post with that. One of our great leaders (certainly not the same person in the picture above) has really really wanted to do this club for a long time. So due to his persistence we gave in. In the past I’ve given in to other ideas I wasn’t fond of, including Kentucky Derby Club, Harry Potter Club, Country Club, and others. But hey, it is all for the kids right? This sophomoric frivolity also balances out my nerdy academic theology side to complete confuse pretty much everyone I know. 

Hope this club doesn’t stink! Hey-o!

PS… As I am out of my local club for a little bit this semester I am posting all of our clubs each week (partially to remind my team haha!) If you want to fast forward and see them all then see this link. – Sean

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Our club is in a little short-term state of flux for our location this semester so we thought through some creative options about our location. One of the things we wanted to do was one of the old fashioned “Rooftop” clubs. In the first years of YL they held some clubs on the top of buildings, very very safe buildings with guardrails that would meet the strictest of safety standards of course. But, in our area we really don’t have very many tall buildings so that option was out.

The next option? Have a club in the back of a U-Haul of course! Now, just to be clear, we are not going to be moving the U-Haul at all for the club, it is simply just a cool and unexpected room, so to speak, to have club. We will park it in the school parking lot, bring a generator and then have most of the club in the back, but some of it out around the truck too. Below are our plans… enjoy!

PS… As I am out of my local club for a little bit this semester I am posting all of our clubs each week (partially to remind my team haha!) If you want to fast forward and see them all then see this link. – Sean

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The Winter Olympics are in full swing… even here in sunny Arizona! This is a great opportunity to use the momentum and billions of dollars of advertising going on to have a fun club.

HERE and HERE are some other ideas too.

PS… As I am out of my local club for a little bit this semester I am posting all of our clubs each week (partially to remind my team haha!) If you want to fast forward and see them all then see this link. – Sean

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Valentine’s Day is still a little ways away but this is a club that we do every year and is a lot of fun. Kissing rugby is a little sketchy but with the right sell and oversight it is an annual favorite. Enjoy!

Here is another idea you can use too.

PS… As I am out of my local club for a little bit this semester I am posting all of our clubs each week (partially to remind my team haha!) If you want to fast forward and see them all then see this link. – Sean

Do you like YLHelp? Spread the word: email | twitter | facebook

It has been amazing to see the Lord move in International YL. I remember a lot of years ago when I had the privilege to show Alexis from Tanzania how to play Brown Eyed Girl as he was going to do program at Lost Canyon that summer. In many ways our teammates in Africa have been leading us (or at least me) in many of the purest elements of YL work for the kingdom.

The YL Freedom Walk is going to be a rich experience for many. I hope you check out their great website and follow them on Twitter.

Watch this video…

Freedom Walk Africa from W. Ashley Maddox on Vimeo.

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In our area we have two areas of focus this year, and one of them is contact work. I’ve tried to document some of our thoughts HERE, HERE, and HERE for just a few examples.

In our monthly area leadership meetings we highlight some of the leaders who are knocking it out of the park, based on our contact work tracker. In fact, we have seen a complete turn around in some of our WL clubs, which has been really encouraging. Another thing we do in our area leadership meetings is include some fun and one of the fun things we did was include a game where we broke up in teams and had leaders begin text message conversations. Now, these are authentic conversations, we just helped initiate them. If they went really long, that is totally OK. I’d rather them have a good convo with a student than listen to our area calendar details, they can get those later.

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This one takes some good prep to make it a big hit but it is a ton of fun. Tell the kids to come dressed in neon and bring glowsticks if they want. Then get some backlights, techno music and hit play on this club!

We posted a similar club HERE a while back too!

PS… As I am out of my local club for a little bit this semester I am posting all of our clubs each week (partially to remind my team haha!) If you want to fast forward and see them all then see this link. – Sean

Do you like YLHelp? Spread the word: email | twitter | facebook

This is a series of posts which outline our leadership funnel and how we have people enter our leadership community. You can read more about it in general here.

First Year Leading (FYL) is a weekly small group of college students who spent the entire year growing in Christ and spend the Spring semester learning Young Life leadership skills. FYL is mostly college freshman though there are sophomores, juniors and other people involved as well. We purposely meet late at night, starting at 9:15PM. By meeting this late it is after any night classes, most work schedules, after campaigners if they are leaders, and most college students stay up late anyway. It also allows me to have my wife lead with me (it is after our kids are in bed and at our house). Having Erin lead with me is huge for the students to learn from both of us and for us to minister together.

Fall Meeting Format

          Snack / dessert (they rotate who brings this)
          1 song (fun, sometimes a YL “oldie”)  – (have them play guitar and lead songs)
          Game / Announcements (they rotate who brings the game… 10-15 min)
          2 songs (worship)
          Life story (I introduce this as the “10 minute” version, I put a timer out) 
          Discussion on the past week in the One Year New Testament (OYNT)
          Prayer (we circle up and ask for “requests” and “updates”, this time is critical)

We rotate who brings the snack, the game and the life story. The snack and game can’t be the same two weeks in a row and the people have to rotate with someone who didn’t do something the previous week.

Here is a word on why we use the One Year New Testament… There are a lot of good books out there to go through, but I want them to first and foremost experience reading the Word of God consistently for an entire year. Rather than have them read the hip new Christian book of the month/year/week, I want to ground them in the scriptures themselves. The One Year New Testament is by far the best way to do this (trust me on this). Now, the funny thing is that it only comes in two versions… The One Year New Testament for Busy Moms and The One Year New Testament for Busy Dads. I buy these ahead of time. They give me $5 (to show personal investment, they cost a little more) and then I give them one and we decorate them the following week to avoid funny looks from friends when they are reading it in public. The Bible study each week is a day by day questioning of “what did you see / what did you learn / what did God teach you / what questions did you have / etc.” The leader must become a facilitator and not a teacher. Fight the urge to teach it to them and use questions to have them teach themselves and dig deeper. We force them to underline and write all over it as they read each day. We have developed a variety of ways to go through it to mix it up after a while too.

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I have two huge boxes full of notes and handouts from my time getting an MDiv in seminary. For some reason I can’t force myself to throw them away, but on the other hand, how often have I pulled them out to find a certain resource?… Maybe once. Maybe less. Meanwhile in 2003 I did a campaigner talk for three middle school guys, it wasn’t very good, and I have no idea what I said, but right now… actually NOW as I type I can get access to it with about ten keystrokes. Much of my seminary content is buried, other than the notes I took with this things called a com-put-er, while all kinds of less important stuff is right at hand.

This isn’t a commercial for Evernote, even as techie as I am it just didn’t click with me. But one thing that has helped me a lot is to organize all of my computer files carefully. In fact one of my original ideas for YLHelp was to simply create an online hard-drive so-to-speak for people to share YL information. Then they invented this thing called Dropbox, yet even Dropbox doesn’t really do it all. Rather than be theoretical, I’m just gonna tell you what I actually do with lots of boring specifics (decide for yourself, some of you actually like specifics, you know who you are).

Currently, all of my files (not my music or videos as they take up too much room) are within Dropbox. I’m sure you all have that already so I’ll skip explaining Dropbox. But I have found Dropbox extra helpful when I’m without my computer as I can look up a file on my phone. It also makes sharing a folder or individual file easy. I also backup all my files with Mozy, but Dropbox provides an additional redundancy. Since I work for YL, some of this will be more helpful for YL staff, but hopefully it will help everyone a little.

I have three main folders in Dropbox

1. Personal files (my eyes only)

2. Area YL files (for YL staff in my area)

3. Camp files (for team leaders in my area)

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