Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

I’m guessing there are a few YLHelp readers who will be heading to Florida this week for the ASC YL Celebration, Young Life’s conference for staff which is every four years. I know my wife and I are really looking forward to it!

I want to put a plug in for the Social Media seminar where my friend Chad Swanzy and others will be sharing great ideas about social media and such. I will be in the crowd taking copious notes from the best!

If interested, I wanted to invite anyone who wants to chit-chat and meet in person to simply meet up near the front after this seminar, ummm lets say to the right of the stage (though I have no idea how the room will be laid out). It would be great to say hi and meet a few of you who have been gracious enough to send me your great ideas and add helpful comments to the posts.

If you are looking for me, my twitter is @seanmcgever and I look like this (with my youngest daughter and future ASU cheerleader!):

I’ve heard lots of great feedback from people who decided to use the book of John for club talks last semester. I’m glad it has been helpful!

My good friend Joey and AD in North Phoenix (such a good friend I’m sure he won’t mind the picture of him and his wonderful wife on this post) took what I started and added to it. It adds some good context for John’s gospel and adds some ideas for chapters I did not cover. He recently sent it to me and gave me permission to pass it along. Enjoy!

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As long as I can remember we have used club cards. Those are the pieces of paper that you give to new kids at club, often during announcements or some type of introduction time, then they fill them out and give them back to leaders. These cards have a long history, all the way back to the first days of Young Life when the national office in Texas would keep them on file, like many “clubs”, to keep track of their members.

Over the years I’ve taken countless hours to type these into spreadsheets. Usually these include information like:

• First name
• Last name
• Home phone
• Cell phone
• Email
• Address
• City
• State
• Zip code
• Parents names
• Favorite movie
• School
• Year in school
• Who invited you

Let’s just be honest… that is a lot of information to type! So I’ve, or a helper or two for me, have spent a lot of time while typing thinking… do we really need all this info? So over time I would type in less and less.

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If you need ideas right away, go to the bottom of this post for a link to the best resource to date on theme clubs.

A few weeks ago (before the post) we had our semester planning meeting and came up with some outlines for our clubs. Here is what we are thinking right now:

Jan 16 – Volleyball hangout

Jan 23 – All Area Club

Jan 30 – Hipster Club

Feb 6 – Progressive Club

Feb 13 – Valentines Club

Feb 20 – No school, no club

Feb 27 – Leap year club

Mar 5 – College Club

Mar 12 – Superhero Club

Mar 19 – Spring Break, no club

Mar 26 – Mom club

Apr 2 – Kentucky Derby Club (seriously, my leaders wanted it)

Apr 9 – All AZ Club

Apr 16 – Canada/Malibu Club

Apr 23 – Mock Prom

Apr 30 – Messy Games Club

May 7 – PJ/Pillowfight Club

May 14 – Senior Run Club

May 21 – Year End Party

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This semester had some incredible highs, and some incredible lows for me.

We already have our Pinnacle HS YL planning meeting for the Spring all set for later this week. But in the meantime, I thought I’d share the top ten posts of the last semester (based on views). Enjoy!

10. Limit the Choices for Talks

9. Christmas Club Again

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It may be too late, but I thought I’d pass along our Christmas campaigners time from tonight.

We opened, as we always do with a game, then we sang some Christmas carols, did some announcements (including an update on Raju, the Developing Global Leaders student staff we are helping support), and then moved into our Bible study before closing with prayer requests and prayer.

For our Bible study we divided up these parts to act out:

Luke 1:26-38 Angel speaks to Mary

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One of my good friends went to be with the Lord Monday night after losing his battle with a very aggressive cancer. His name is Troy Gray, Tempe, AZ Area Director, he was 29 years old.

Back in the mid-90’s Troy never went to my Wyldlife club, I guess the huge clubs and the fact that all his friends went simply weren’t enough to get him to come, I’d always give him a hard time about that over the years. But he went to Arcadia High School Young Life, the same one I went to years earlier, and his life changed through the power of Jesus and wonderful leaders like Dick and Kathy Mason, Mike Olson, and many others. Troy went on to be trained and discipled by our Area Director in Scottsdale, Rick Wilson, and later to become his intern after graduating from ASU. I was a few years ahead of Troy, but our paths have been very similar. He is also best of friends with my brother-in-law and some of my other close friends. Troy went from a sketchy teenage punk, that happened to be fantastic as basketball (he was a star in high school), to an incredible man of God, wonder husband and father, and an admired and top-notch Area Director, and he still kicked my butt in basketball too.

I’m not going to say much more, but I do want to say that I miss him very much, I love him, and I am excited to see him in a few years (whenever the Lord returns or He takes me home).

Here are a couple fun memories:

Woodleaf Program 2005 (with Joey and Laura Colletti)

A Hilarious Contact Work Training Video (with Tanita Maddox)

Troy speaking about Young Life adventures about a week before he found out he had cancer

Our club is finishing up the semester tonight with a Ugly Sweater Christmas party. We begin the night with Christmas cookies, my wonderful wife makes a bunch of cookies and then we let kids decorate them with icing and frosting. We try to keep it clean, but if you are wondering if 50, 75, or even 100+ kids can do this, the answer is yes! We also have a small Christmas tree in our hallway with small Christmas ordainments that each club kid can write their name on and put it up on the tree. We had that up for the last two weeks and it will stay up until after Christmas. After the cookies, we will sing some Christmas songs, then do a huge white elephant gift exchange (the key is a really strict time keeper!), and then tonight we are doing a leader cardboard testimonies followed by a leader panel Q&A time.

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I’ll keep this short and sweet. Post It Note club will stick with the kids for a long time. If you got the pun in there then you would probably like most of my jokes because they are almost all like that, really punny.

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Last night we did a fun club, iClub. Basically everything had some kind of technology or Apple twist to it.

The mixers was a Words with Friends type game. Everyone got a label with a letter and point value, put it on their forehead and then the guys played the girls by making a word, lining up and grabbing a knee. To do the game you will need this file I made with letters and points, print it out on standard address labels.

Then once again we used the wonderful Polleverywhere web site to do live polling via text message. We did:

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