Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

My friend Matt Golley, an amazing artist who I’ve mentioned him before, is pioneering YL in Puerto Rico. There has never been YL in Puerto Rico! How can that be?!? This is a really well-done video about the need of the kids there, one-third of the population is under the age 18, and there is tremendous local church support for YL. If it sparks you interest, get in touch with Matt mgolleyyl (at) gmail (dot) com.

The “This Year…” series looks back at lessons learned in the past year of YL. It will feature several posts and guest posts.

Here is one from my friend Andi from Elk Grove, CA…

We started a new club this year and one of the things that we did to help train leaders and make sure we continued doing contact work was to have club every other week.  Then on the opposing week we did contact work together as a team. For contact work we went bowling, did the eat the menu event, played ultimate frisbee, had a pizza party, rode segways with chimps, you know the standard stuff. It was a lot of fun and it helped our leaders continue to do contact work and not just come to club.  We also set contact work goals and held each other accountable for obtaining our goals.  We also reevaluated our goals often. 

Thanks Andi! What did you learn this year? Let me know at smcgever (at) yahoo dot com.

Here is an idea passed along by my friend Drew from Colorado. His friend Zach came up with an idea for follow-up from camp. Instead of putting a book into kids hands and asking them to read it. Zach is sending out an abbreviated version of a quiet time for kids to do a few times a week as a Facebook message to individual kids who started following Christ at camp. We’ve found this to be successful as kids are more apt to read things on the computer written as messages to them then a book.

Great idea Zach!

The “This Year…” series looks back at lessons learned in the past year of YL. It will feature several posts and guest posts.

Here is one from my friend Tanita from Tucson, AZ…

Kids like to cook together–weird thing I learned after I invited 4-5 kids to come over and cook dinner together on a Monday night when there wasn’t YL and 16 kids showed up. They learned how to peel a potato, slice vegetables, sauté, and all sorts of cooking stuff that none of them had ever done before. The kids LOVED it, guys and girls put on my aprons and followed a recipe and made dinner & dessert. But they loved the "family" home feeling of making and eating dinner together. They begged to do it again. I suggest you find a recipe that has a lot of prep to give kids something to do, cutting veggies, preparing spices, etc.

The next time I invited kids over to cook again, 25 kids showed up…that was a little crazy…

SO, Top Chef club was the most popular club we had over the year…there were sandwich stations set up with different supplies provided, and then teams of 4-5 kids had to create a sandwich that was judged by a couple leaders.

PS… If you have things you learned this year, email me! smcgever (at) yahoo.com or find me on Facebook.

The “This Year…” series looks back at lessons learned in the past year of YL. It will feature several posts and guest posts.

Here is one from my friend Dougie in Qualicum Beach, Vancouver Island, Canada…

We have been working with some higher risk students through contact work and they started coming to club.  The only problem is that they have lagging social skills and really need attention so we came up with a plan…why not take them away for a camp?

But then we still struggled as to what to do with them…so we decided to do a work crew camp at our camping facility.  It’s a big like extended contact work, with a club talk and an opportunity for the students to develop their work ethic and grow in their faith.

It’s been really easy to set up and local businesses have been sponsoring the camps…we invite 4 students to go and then just drive them up to camp, we work in the pits for about 6 hours a day and then have free use of all the facilities.  We go on "excursions to town" and hang out with the YL community there. I set up a meeting with a guy that works with us in the Pits and he shares something about his Christian faith with our students.

It was hard the first time to set a precedent for behavior on the trip but now the students figure all this and respect the camp and their leader enough not to pull many stunts.  They really enjoy working in the pits and achieving something.  The Ministry of Children and Families and youth probation have been really encouraging along with our local municipality and the trips can be used for work experience credits in school too.

The “This Year…” series looks back at lessons learned in the past year of YL. It will feature several posts and guest posts.

Here is one from my friend Jason in Flagstaff…

Don’t set a club start date.  Instead set a goal for leaders knowing 100 or 200 kids (or whatever goal you think is appropriate for your school/club) and once they know kids by name and are committed to praying for them then you will start club.  This starts the year focused on contact work, prayer, and recognition of what’s truly important.  Relationships.

OK, I got lots of support and prayer for this conversation. Thank you so much!

Just so you know, when I have spoke at camps I look at the big picture and try to integrate a lot of the themes and keep to one primary analogy. I also start with the last talk and work backward, among other things. I learned a lot of this from Marty, Rick and Larry, some of my good friends.

This summer I am thinking of moving up the talk sequence one day so that I can add a little more about a part of the gospel I think we could talk about more, that is Jesus Christ in you and the call to follow him.

Here is the traditional 7 day camp speaking topics (in general) breakdown…

1. It gives one more day to process the cross.
2. It gives one more day to have one-on-ones that include the cross.
3. Many resurrection talks are mostly about the “response”, this gives the resurrection more emphasis.
4. I really want to give a picture of what it means to follow Jesus while we still have them at camp.

Here are the challenges in my mind:

1. It makes the first two person of Christ talks very important because sin is moved up a day.
2. Some leaders will not like changing the sequence just because it is different.
3. Others I’m sure too…

I have a lot more I can share. If this generates comments/conversation I’ll keep the posts coming.

PS God bless you in your camps and fundraising this summer! It is a battle for me too, we are all in this together! We leave for Woodleaf in 4 days!

A good friend of mine sent out an email about camp follow-up with ideas he has collected over the years. I thought they were excellent and wanted to pass them along.

What do you do for camp follow-up?

Read the rest of this entry »

Would you help me? I am actually very excited and prepared to speak at summer camp (don’t be worried if you are bringing kids when I’m speaking haha). I’ve spoken at summer camp before and lots of weekend camps. And the powers-that-be asked me again, so apparently I don’t suck. But I’d like to get some ideas and feedback from you all. In fact I’m thinking about trying a thing or two that would be a little different then what I’ve seen in YL. I’m willing to share those ideas on ylhelp but I need some confirmation that you will work with me. So, will you help me and, in addition, commit to praying for me while I’m at camp? If you are in, then leave a comment. If I get 10+ comments then I’ll start laying out my ideas. If not, then I’ll save my time for other things. No worries.

Sean

The Leader Panel is a great option in lieu of a club talk. Is it 10 minutes before club and you don’t have Bill Paige or Marty Caldwell around to do the club talk at the last second? BOOM!  Leader Panel! Is it 30 minutes after club has started and your leader who was supposed to do the talk isn’t showing up because they were going to do it but they decided to go to the grand opening for Wolverine at midnight and now are just “too busy” or “too tired” to do it, or even give you a heads up? BOOM! Leader Panel!

But it isn’t just a backup option, it can be a great time for kids to ask questions and for leaders to share. It also can be a good time for the leader who isn’t all that comfortable to do a club talk to share up-front. One club in our area did it a few weeks ago and it was so powerful that some kids came up crying afterwards and wanted to talk more about a relationship with Christ… BOOM! Leader Panel! My club did it last week after some year-end senior testimonies.

Here are a couple tips:

1. Explain it clearly. Tell the students this has the potential to be a really good discussion if they take a minute to think of an honest question.
2. Give them 1-2 minutes to think of a question, play some chill music in the background.
3. Then pass out the cards and I recommend golf pencils (they are cheap).
4. When the kids turn the questions in, have an experienced leader filter the questions and pick leaders to answer them.
5. Expect silly and lame questions and put them aside. The more you can keep the panel discussion on track… the better.
6. If you are worried about too many lame questions, prep a couple questions beforehand to answer.
7. You can use any scrap of paper (we used the back of club fliers last week), but I have also used the following file if you want to use it: