Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

I hope your summer was great. I hope to post some ideas and lessons learned over the summer from camp, assignments, campaigners, etc.

In the mean time, the Fall semester is upon us. In my area school started this week and I have been meeting and catching up with leaders non-stop.

With club looming, I know we all are having team club planning sessions. My club had one last week. I’ll be posting our new clubs as we prepare them.

I took some time to put together a club planner with Monday club dates and an entire semester of clubs planned. I did this using some of the clubs we used last year. If you are looking for ideas, I suggest you print this out and bring it to your team meeting. If you have ideas or clubs from last year, send them my way so we can share them.

Enjoy!

Fall Club Planner and Full Club Plans

(Note: some of the details on each club may not perfectly fit the week. For example the club talks are not in order on the individual club sheets.)

Chance are, you are having a team meeting very soon to catch up and plan a ton of stuff. I’ve attached what we did last week with our team.

What do you do at your team meetings? What works? What doesn’t?

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but this blog has been a huge encouragement to me and others. I’ve been able to connect with other leaders, and also develop friendships with people all over the world. Some YL people, some friends of YL, some that are not involved in YL. If you don’t read blogs or even know what RSS is, you should find out. I look at it like a free customized magazine subscription that I can read everyday on my favorite topics. Think of ESPN the magazine + Christianity Today + Relevant Magazine + Theology Nerdy Stuff + Business Magazines all together and better.

YLHelp.com started in February 2008, and I hope the first full school year of it will enable it to be a useful resource for others. I also hope that you will write posts and contribute ideas through comments too. It is OUR tool.

We have had such a hard time with campaigners over the years. With the busyness of kids and leaders it is so hard to get another night out of them. I know lots of clubs fight through this and win (even the club right down the street from us). Yet, we have lost over and over.

This year we moved to having club at a local restaurant that offers half-price appetizers and has a cool atmosphere. We spend $10-20 per week and the kids chip in too. This has allowed us to keep a consistent meeting time and the cool atmosphere helps. We even built a positive relationship with many of the people who work there.

The downsides are the lack of depth that is hindered by the environment, also no worship and then Mondays are crazy for everyone. It also makes it hard to pick up kids and really be ready for club.

So in review, we knew the downsides to our campaigner plan, but at least it was a consistent place to meet and do a Bible study.

Any ideas on how to add another night or morning (tried that too) successfully?

This year we started an official campus club. There are a couple reasons why. First, official campus clubs can use the facilities free, that help a ton. Next, this allows us to be on campus more and even do announcements. It also allows us to be at things like freshman orientation. Also, it allows us to give a formal name to the incredible leadership efforts our students put in (i.e. we have a president, vice president, etc, though we don’t mention it much, it might help their college resumes).

I was hesitant and careful about how we use this tool. First, it is student initiated. Also, the official club portion represents only the lunch meetings. We do not promote after school events through the announcements. So what we have settled on is a once a month meeting at lunch with our club kids to play a game or show a video of camp, and then talk about our plans for the next month and how the kids can be involved. Through this we have planned a couple student-led clubs.

I think we really are in the first stages of using this tool effectively. In fact, if you have any ideas, let us know.

This year I completed a Master of Divinity degree. It took a lot. A lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot from my family, a lot of everything. Yet, it was all worth it.

I was rather serious ,even before seminary, that we all need to dig deep in our faith and really understand it. My quest began when I would come home from WL club and think, "what is it that we really are asking them to do?" Then, as years went by, kids and leaders would come to me with great questions that showed me that I needed to study more.

I’m not suggesting everyone needs to go to seminary. What I am suggesting is that we need to keep digging deeper. Don’t stay on the surface level of the Bible and theology. As leaders we need to know why we believe what we do (or maybe figure out what you do believe).

Sometimes YL can be viewed as a "simplistic" or "shallow" ministry. This is the farthest thing from the truth, I can attest to that from a theological position from my training. Yet, sometimes I think our leaders can be tempted to hide behind our relational strengths rather than digging deeper. So my encouragement is to dig deeper. Read, study, listen to podcasts, take a class at your church, etc. If you need suggestions I’d be happy to point you in the right direction. 

This year I had the opportunity to speak at a snowboarding camp in Northern California. They were nice enough to take care of my arrangements, but I thought I’d push my luck and see if they had room for me to bring one of my club kids with me. And they said yes! (Thanks SVYL!)

It was an incredible move. First, because he felt really valued and special that I asked him. Second, we got to go to camp. Third, it gave him vision and a behind-the-scenes look into what we do. Also, the group of kids and leaders said it gave them a cool example that they want to do themselves.

I have no idea if I’ll be asked to speak somewhere like that again, but it could work in all kinds of situations. Think this way… If I am going out of town, can I bring a club kid with me? You might only do it once a year or every other year, but it is certainly worth it!

We were having an all you can eat Taco Bell club (at Taco Bell). As if that wasn’t good enough, I talked to some guys about making a video to promote it.

Not only did it help the guys, some of whom had only been once to YL, but they wanted their friends to see it and come too. It spread online real fast. We also used a song from a band from their school. That helped too.

I’ll definitely do this again. Here is it…

Every year when I get back from camp I have club kids who want to keep cabin time going. So I sit down and pull together the best follow-up camp and campaigner resources I can find. This year I put a considerable amount of work into developing the best 10 camp follow-up Bible studies I could come up with. I decided to call these “Cabin Time Continued”.

Here are the 10 topics included in the study:

First 5 Camp Review

1. Christ at Camp and at Home
2. Person of Christ
3. Sin
4. Cross
5. Resurrection

Second 5 Foundational Topics

6. Christ in You: Identity in Christ
7. Christ as Lord: Deity and Ruler of my life
8. Christ Forgives: When we go our own way
9. Christ Communicates: Word
10. Christ Communicates: Prayer

It is a 48 page booklet that has worked well with my club kids. I printed 100 copies and ran out within a week of being back from camp. I’m going to print more. If you are interested in getting some for your camp follow-up, email me at smcgever@yahoo.com.

It can be used in a group or individually. The format is centered on interacting with scripture through questions and creative learning.

In case you are interested, here is a sample… It is all set to print on both sides, fold and hand out.

Cabin Time Continued - Lesson 8 Christ Forgives: When we go our own way

Recently I have had some requests to order these, I’m trying this link to handle it, let me know if you have any trouble with it.

In my area we had no formal plan for recruiting and developing college freshman as leaders. I asked around in my state if anyone else was doing anything, I didn’t get a ton of feedback. I asked around nationally and I got a little more. Eventually a key person told me about the "premier" freshman program in the United States. They were kind enough to send me all their material.

I like planning and training and all that stuff a lot. (So much that now there is ylhelp.com haha) So I worked through all their material and my own and came up with "FYL" First Year Leading. We had a free kickoff retreat to the beach, free leadership camp in September and we met every Thursday night from 9:20PM until about Midnight at my house. The first semester it was pretty much a small group then the second semester we started including leadership training elements. The format was so simple: food, short game, worship, life story, then discuss the past week’s reading in the One Year New Testament (this is a GREAT tool).

This is separate from our traditional leader training we do each semester.

We have high school seniors, juniors and even sophomores who are saying they can’t wait to be a part of it. Most of their leaders are involved in FYL so it is contagious.

If you don’t have a plan for freshman in college, you should! Contact me if you need some ideas.