Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

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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Last week we had a fun club, Mean Girls Club. I was worried that the movie was a little dated, or that it would have been a little negative, but it wasn’t. We did a trust fall, and a fun “Mean Guys” skit that one of our leaders, Wil, wrote based on quotes from the movie. Also, there are lots of memes and pics available online to update on your club’s Facebook/Twitter/Instagram feeds to promote club. The skit will take some practice and familiarity with the movie (watch a few clips online to get a feel for it if needed).

Below are the club plans and the lines from the skit. Enjoy!

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Next year, our area is kicking off a focused effort for one-on-one discipling and mentoring of leaders, mostly college sophomores (the year after our FYL program).

If we all got in a room and tried to find a consensus about “how do we share the gospel with people”, we would probably all describe almost the same thing (with some variations here and there). But, if we did the same thing and tried to find a consensus about “how do we disciple and mentor people”, I think we would be all over the place. One reason is that “how to do it” is not as explicit in the Bible as is the gospel (I could talk a lot about that, but I’ll save that for a later day). Because of this, I think most people feel like they are starting with a blank page when they think about adult discipleship and mentoring. I don’t have a blank page, I myself have been discipled and mentored, and have done that for others as well, and, as you might imagine, I usually have lots of ideas about all kinds of stuff, including this. But, I would imagine the collective readership of YLHelp has bigger, better ideas, more experience, and better questions as well.

Just to be clear, this would not be leader training. This would be something along the lines of a college aged person meeting once a week or every other week one-on-one with someone more mature in their life and faith.

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Here is a fun idea from Tanita Maddox from Santa Barbara. They called it “Roll the Dice Club”…

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There actually isn’t anything super difficult or special about this club; it’s just a fun twist to do something different one night.

First, we really just planned a normal club.

Then, we made a big dice (roughly 20" x 20" x 20") – and put the parts of club (plus some other fun items) on the dice. We told the kids, "you control Young Life tonight! Whatever you roll, we will do!"

One thing that makes this a winner–we chose kids to roll the dice that we wanted up front, but were generally too shy or embarrassed to do an up-front game.

On the dice, you can put whatever you want to do that night. Some suggestions are:

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In our FYL group we cover the history of Young Life. Then we ask the leaders to “teach it back” the following week. Two of our great FYL students made this video to show the following week. I got a good laugh out of it! Nice job Steven and Anthony!

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A while back we did “Kool-Aide” club (“oh, yeaaahhh!”). I pretty much didn’t have much more in mind than someone dressed in a Kool-Aide man outfit bursting through a fake wall at club yelling, “Oh yeeaahhh!”

As it turns out, a Kool-Aide man outfit is hard to make, but we did work it into a video. The club plan was rather simple…

Pre-club: Have some kool-aide out for kids to enjoy.

Mixer: Mega Twister, so tape a few Twister games together. Then call out colors and body parts, but with Kool-Aide colors (ex: Blue Thunder!)

Participation Game: Something to do with sour pickles and kool-aide powder mix. I think this got a bit odd, so I don’t recommend it. I think I was in the other room doing something.

Skit: The fun video posted above.

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