Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Over the years I’ve tried a few things to change the name of campaigners to something else: Wiffleball Wednesdays, Commandos (WL), and a few others. I’ve also heard of names like “Man Club”, “Super-Man Club”, “Breakfast Club”, “Brothers of Thunder”, and others. My friend Alex wrote up an article on one name that has worked pretty well and he explains why. I thought I’d share it with you. Thanks Alex!

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Over the Summer of 2011 I announced to our Young Life club that we would no longer be calling our weekly Bible studies “Campaigners” anymore but now we would be calling it “Community.” The process of making this change took a while, but I really believe the change created some positive affects on our club and especially on our weekly Bible studies. About a year before announcing the change I tossed out the idea of changing the name at a team meeting, this didn’t go over so well immediately. We thought through a couple name changes, things like “Large Group,” “Small Group,” or “Home Group.” At the time my team didn’t like any of those suggestions, and my team, especially the Junior Leaders weren’t crazy about the name change. I tried explaining that the name “Campaigners” was incredibly outdated as it began as a term for those that “Campaign” for Christ. By no means am I against “campaigning” for Christ, but the term “campaign” isn’t exactly a term that’s tossed out in day-to-day conversation with our High School or Middle School friends.

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After months and months of club, you, your team, and your club kids might be ready for a change. Here are a couple ideas you can use in the last couple weeks of the school year:

1. Leader panel

This is mostly a replacement for the club talk. For more details see this post, complete with cards you can print out.

2. Senior led club

For this club we simply hand the club over to the seniors and say “you got it!” We make sure there are some junior leaders working on most of it. We ask one or two seniors to give their testimony at the end of the club. They always love this, just be sure to give them enough time to work on it, especially with how busy they get near graduation.

3. Best-of club

For this club we make a poster and put it out a few weeks in advance. Kids then vote on their favorite games and skits from the year. Then you simply re-do the ones that are their most favorite. You can find more details here, including a poster you can use.

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In the beginning of each semester our club does a planning meeting to plan all of our clubs. One of the keys to quality brainstorming is to not rule out an ideas (initially). We vote and then I add some input to make a final call. So, when we had our planning meeting in January and “Kentucky Derby Club” was suggested by one of our awesome junior leaders I wrote it on the white board and moved on. Then they votes and, to my surprise it had a lot of votes. I tried to suggest I didn’t think it would produce a lot of excitement among students and was pretty random, at least for our community.

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My favorite and least favorite moment of the YL year is being at high school graduations. I see friends walking across the stage, some are brand new creations in Christ, others have become mature disciples, and others are making progress slowly but surely in their faith. But I also find myself cheering loudly for some kids while inside I cringe and think… I wonder if there was anything I could have done differently, Lord I wish my friend on stage really knew You. My confidence is in the Lord alone, and I quickly remind myself of 1 Cor. 3:6… Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God makes it grow. Only God can grow people. But I wonder, was I faithful to plant, faithful to water?

John Irwin is a wise man and years ago told me that he would make a list of seniors that he didn’t think he got the chance to really share with them all that they needed to hear. I want to challenge you and myself to a call for BOLDNESS in the final weeks of school in talking to seniors. Here are a couple ideas about how to go about that:

Make a list of seniors.

1. First, and foremost, stop and pray. God may bring to mind a friend who you need to talk with right away.
2. Look on Facebook or Twitter. Look through your entire friend list.
3. Look on your phone. Scroll through all your contacts.
4. Look through old club and camp lists. Maybe you have these on your computer or can get this from your local YL staff person.
5. Look at old camp and club pictures.

Make a plan to communicate.

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I hope you saw my earlier post about the key components of a great camp video. Here is another post that adds to it…

Why it’s good to have a video for camp: Even when your camp Is fully booked!

While you are in the mood for great YL videos, please take a moment and see this spot-on take on contact work from the YL Leader Blog.

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A few weeks ago we had a lot of fun with mom club. Several people came dressed up like a mom, no offense to you moms out there. We also had some cookies when kids showed up. You could have some milk too to make it special. When kids were arriving we played the song “Stacy’s Mom” in the background. That might have been a little sketchy but YOLO, jk. I am trying to use YOLO for the next 48 hours before it is “sooo 48 hours ago”.

We started off club with the pregnant balloon pop mixer. For our game we pulled up a few boys and some young ladies and told them it was a kissing contest, the boys would be blindfolded and then they would need to describe, in detail, the kiss. After the guys were blindfolded we brought in their moms. They kissed their moms and described it. We picked kids (and moms) that we thought would have fun with it but wouldn’t get too silly with it. Obviously we had to arrange this a few days early with the moms, but the guys had no idea. It was a ton of fun, lots of laughs, and kids were talking about it for days at school. It also gave us a good opportunity to have a few moms come and check out club.

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Many know that Denny Rydberg, the second longest tenured President of Young Life other than Jim Rayburn, has an important role that he plays in the mission of YL. Recently many really have applauded Denny for his creative initiatives allowing Young Life to reach more teenagers than ever before. Even with all this momentum, we are sad to hear the surprising announcement in the Young Life Sunday Morning email, Palm Sunday edition, that Denny will no longer be in his role as backup performer of the “Teach Me How to Denny” dance. Many thought this was the key to YL stepping it up to the next level in reaching kids for Jesus.

Southwest Regional Director John Irwin responded today via email saying, quote, “This is a sad day for YL. Errr body loves him, Errr errr body loves him.” Elk Grove Area Director, and YL Brand Ambassador, Andi Yanok could be heard all over the Twitter-sphere in less than 140 characters, “You ain’t messing with my Denny #errbody”.

In other news, stock prices have been soaring, and many in the YL world can guess the number one performing company of the 2011-2012 school year (the school year is a new Wall Street metric). You guessed it, Kiwi shoe shine company. There have been accusations that many in the YL world have some sort of insider trading connections due to an unusually strong number of conference calls supporting the brand. Kiwi has responded with a nearly unprecedented gift to the camping department. It is no surprise that this summer YL’s newest camp will be the “Kiwi Shoe Shine for Car Windows Family Ranch, Sponsored by Kiwi Shoe Shine” (KSSFCWFRSBKSS for short). Camp Manager Josh Smiley sent out a secure email to friends saying, “I can’t wait to ride the liquid shoe shine super slide on a plastic tray!”

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I remember sitting in a small room in 1995 at Woodleaf as the staff edited the VHS camp videos they hoped to get to kids in time before they left. One entire night was left to render (basically get the computer to start a video process and then leave it alone) the intro to the camp video. They would have the computer run overnight just for the opening 20 second scene. The staff also had to finish the video about 36 hours early so someone could drive the master copy to Sacramento to make bulk copies of the VHS tapes in time for the kids before they left on buses (it was all worth it for the ropes course scene with the Enya soundtrack in the background) . I’m sure a couple old farts will say “you were LUCKY” about all this camp video stuff, but all that to say… camp videos have come a long way!

The very best video guy I’ve met is Ashley Maddox. His wife Tanita is on YL staff in Santa Barbara. He has a great guest post on making camp videos and other things from YL video guru Dan Dyer. At Ashley’s website you can also get some inspiration from other videos he has put together. Be sure to check out his post:

Making Camp Videos with Dan Dyer

Here are two of my favorite videos Ashley has made. The first is the best video I know of to explain camp to parents (and donors). The second one is a promo for Lost Canyon.

Lost Canyon: The Eric Scofield Tour from W. Ashley Maddox on Vimeo.

Young Life Lost Canyon (2008-09) from W. Ashley Maddox on Vimeo.

I briefly mentioned in the past that we have done a Chipotle Club. I don’t know about you but I love Chipotle. I think I even see people doing @totalylmove quotes about Chipotle being a YL staple as much as Chacos and Nalgenes. Our club kids love it too. For our club students came dressed in foil, we had games basically involving eating burritos, or using a water balloon launcher to shoot burritos at people, you know…that kind of thing. I don’t think I mentioned it because we have a local connection with Chipotle that has hooked us up with some free burritos and I didn’t want to gloat or rub it in (but I guess I said it so…oops).

My friend at Chipotle just told me about a program that could be fun for a YL club kid to do. It is the Chipotle on Campus Student Brand Manager. I’ve seen this type of thing on college campuses, but not for high schools. If selected, the student will get $100 at Chipotle, some swag, and a Chipotle party for 20 of their friends (read as: you and your club kids).

Now I should be up front and say that I don’t know anyone who has ever done this, in fact I think it is pretty new program. So I really can’t say it is good, bad, or neither, but if based on how great Chipotle has been as a company, I bet it could be fantastic. I could see a key club kid or junior leader contacting the local marketing rep and then having a Chipotle club to help spread the word. I think it could end up helping with fundraisers and attract kids to club who like Chipotle (I went to my first YL thing because of the food).

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I’ve done a few skits in my life and one thing I realized was that a key prop or outfit can make the whole thing work. One time I was doing a program for a YL camp and I simply went down to a fantastic costume store and decided I would just do a program around the best outfit I could find. I think that one ended up being a rapping parrot named P-Thug.

Anyway, I was online a few weeks ago and saw these and I instantly knew we had our camp sell skit. They are a bit expensive, but I bought two. It was worth it. They lent themselves perfectly to a lumberjack type of a skit. That brought to mind the old SNL skit Hans and Franz.

So for our camp sell skit we adopted a bit of this Hans and Franz attitude. The skit is one experienced lumberjack (a skinnier guy), showing a rookie lumberjack (our biggest buffest leader)  how to make the cut (pun intended). One of their key lines is that they are going to be “Lumber-Jacked!” 

We are going to Malibu for the first time as a club ever this summer, so we have added a Canadian theme as well. Lots of “eh” and C-A-N-A-D-A jokes. Each week they come out and tell us how to prepare to come to Canada and how to get Lumber-Jacked for camp.

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