Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

-A huge list of camp resources from the team at the YL Leader Blog!

-A great training guide for leaders at camp from YL Digital!

-Great advice for those leaving their spouse and children for a week.

-Spotify playlist for the dining hall at YL camp.

-Ideas for cabin unity outfits.

-Three components of a great camp video.

-More links!

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Follow-up is more important than camp. Put another way, discipleship is more important than conversion (since discipleship includes conversion, see Mt 28:19-20). Discipleship is primarily more “caught” than “taught”, so make sure you are a living as a disciple first and foremost. We also are commanded to teach our disciples about the Christian life and the word of God. I’m sure many YLHelp readers are already aware, but I’ve put together a variety of booklets to make this easier. 

1. Cabin Time Continued – I know it might be a bit tacky to recommend something I put together, but wouldn’t you be worried if I didn’t think it was worth recommending?! I wrote this booklet as a follow-up to camp as it replicates the traditional club talks we hear at camp, and then follows up with several of what I think are the most essential topics to think about immediately after hearing camp talks. This has become the second highest selling book in the YL camp stores, you might be able to find it there, but it may be easier to order here.

2. Live Like This – This is a study through the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ teaching in this section is radical and counter-cultural. Part 1 & 2 provide 20 studies that can easily be adapted for campaigners, either following the lessons in a teaching format, or a do-it-on-your-own and compare notes each week format.

3. Mark in a Month – This is a study through the Gospel of Mark in 30 days. This study includes minimal commentary other than a few thoughts for each passage. The emphasis in this study is the process of working through the carefully crafted questions and the daily repetitive questions meant to draw ones attention to the Lord’s activity in daily life.

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Lord willing, you will have the privilege of introducing, or reintroducing one of your teenage friends to Jesus Christ this summer while at a YL or WL camp. Here are a couple suggestions of what to do:

• Pray with them and let them say in their own words what they believe about the Lord
• Within the next hour or two, challenge them to tell one or two of their close friends at camp about the decision that they made
• Within the next 24 hours, get them a Bible, underline 3 of your favorite verses, write them on the inside cover with a note and the page number to find them. Tell them to read them, then on the bus, or sooner, read them together and talk about them. (The camp staff should be able to find you a Bible to give them, even if it is day one at camp, if not, find your area director, they will buy one for the student.
• Tell them about the say-so and new Christian walk
• If you have more than one day, meet with them each morning to pray together and read at least one Bible verse together
• Tell them about your campaigner plan after camp
• Tell them you are bringing them to church with you when you get home (and buy them lunch afterward to talk about it)

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Tomorrow we leave for our summer YL trip, including the 15 hour (hopefully not longer!) bus ride. Here are a couple things I bring in addition to the normal stuff I bring as a leader:

Bus Ride

• All of the camp forms (of course)
• Blank camp forms (just in case)
• Pens for camp forms
• An “inverter” for the bus (plug it in a car socket and then you can plug a normal 120V plug into it)
• Bags, tape, markers, etc. to collect electronics
• A head lamp for late night spot checking for various things on the bus
• DVDs of fun animated movies

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It may be too late for some of you, but I thought I’d post our training packet for new leaders. We go through it with all of our new leaders about a week before we go to camp. Some of the details might be specific to the camps our area goes to, and some of our own specific philosophies may be different from yours. Feel free to edit it as needed. Remember… every new leader needs to be trained before camp. I’ve had the privilege of serving as work crew boss, program, speaker, and director at many summer camps and it is obvious when people came to camp and were not prepared; usually it makes it difficult for them, their kids, and the rest of the camp, and I don’t blame them, I just wonder why they weren’t trained. Occasionally we re-train everyone in our area (taught by our experienced leaders) as a refresher. Blessings on all of your camping this summer!

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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.

I’m convinced that YL is a grassroots organization. In fact, there is no doubt about it. When done right, whether in my neighborhood here in Scottsdale, AZ, or in another country around the world (this is not just a guess, talk to YL international friends), the mission of YL is owned, fueled and grown by local volunteers who say, “I want to share Jesus in my community!” When I came on staff, I made it my goal to be a good leader (of course), but to be an even better leader of leaders, one who would equip others to own their own mission fields. In the past decade or so, one of the best things we have done to carry this out is to have a formal junior leader program.

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Color Chaos is an event similar to the color run type events. Basically we run a YL camp messy games culminating in a color/paint event at the end where each school tries to get their school colors on the other schools.

Below is a complete run down of what we did. It may be easier to read in a pdf, for that

Here is the general outline for the prep and event:

1. Find the right location

2. Get the word out

3. Prep the materials and the event

4. Run the event

5. Post-event: Clean up and pics online

1. Find the Right Location

The right location is critical. Ideally it will be centrally located. Furthermore, you need access to water, potentially lights, and obviously the area needs to be available.

I looked into the sunset time for our date and it was well before our normally club time. We normally have most clubs in our area from 7:15-8:45 or so. The sunset around our time of year was 6:52. So we looked for an available location with lights. As it turned out, none, absolutely none were available to rent. So we had to do our event before the sun went down. Initially I was worried this might hurt attendance, but it didn’t. We had our event from 6:00-7:15 and that was plenty of time.

At first I thought that we really wouldn’t need water, or we could find a way to get water to the location, but I decided it was essential, and it was. My recommendation is not to do this event without access to a water hose. More on that later…

Pick a large location. On the night of our event, it turned out there were lots of children’s soccer and football practices where we wanted to do the event. Fortunately we picked a large enough park to find another spot.

2. Get the Word Out

Once we had the date, time, and location, we made a Facebook event. Here is what we posted:

It is important to tell them to be prepared to ruin their clothes (including shoes). Tell them to bring three things: a white shirt, a towel, and a bottle of water. I checked with our girl leaders and my wife and after talking through the paint and such, they said that girls having white shirts would not be an issue since there really wasn’t all that much water and the paint actually helped things in that regard.

Once thing we didn’t do, but I would do next time, it to start promoting the hashtag #colorchaos for the Facebook/Twitter/Instragram pics and promotion.

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This weekend I had the privilege once again to be a part of the Western Division (now Southwest and Northwest Division) Student Staff Weekend, also known as the “49 Conference”, after Isaiah 49:1. I’d venture to say these are some of the best leaders in the entire mission (maybe I’m biased haha)!

This year I presented a seminar on how to plan a campaigners Bible study. Below is the handout if you are interested. It basically has some intro ideas about campaigners and then goes through an acronym I made up called: BAD. I even played Michael Jackson’s “BAD” song as people were walking in. BAD actually stands for Bible, Arrangement, Delivery. I have thoughts and tips for each part. Give it a look, maybe you will find something helpful!

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For our all area leadership meeting last night we spent a lot of time worship and asking the Lord to put specific names on our heart for summer camp. We were specifically waiting for five names each. After time in prayer, waiting, then more prayer, and then searching through our phones and fb lists and events, I handed out old fashioned key tags. On the front side (the part you can see), we wrote the name of our camp (Woodleaf for our YL trip, Lost Canyon for our WL trip). But, then on the back we wrote the five names of people we are praying for and asking to come to camp (this is hidden and can’t be seen). This will be a reminder for us every time we grab our keys.  As a group we lifted up each name in prayer and were reminded about the significance of salvation. I’m looking forward to a leader meeting after our camps this summer to review our key tags and to see what the Lord has done.

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Two years ago, we were thrilled to share the great new club idea of the “clubble”, or “club in a bubble”. Since then, it has taken the YL world by storm! We’ve heard reports of the clubble being used for club, for messy games, for dance parties, at YL camps, all over the place!

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