Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

The other week we had to scramble to come up with an alternative club/event after school for one of our Wyldlife clubs. Here is what we did:

1. Supplies: We went Little Caesars and ordered eight hot and ready pizzas. We also got 4 extra boxes (free), and an order of breadsticks.

2. Location: We told kids to meet us at the park next to the school.

3. Game #1 Pizza Pull: Make two single file lines and then have a kid sit on an empty pizza box and have a partner pull them by the legs down about 20 feet and then around a cone (or another box). It is a race to see who can have everyone in their line finish first (have them sit down after their turn).

4. Game #2 Bread Pass: Same two teams and lines, this time you have them put a breadstick under their chin and race around the cone, then pass it to the next person in line (like the old orange pass game). First team to have everyone go wins (have them sit down after their turn).

5. Game #3 Pizza Eat: Pick 4 kids and take 4 slices and put them on a table or park bench, have them put their hands behind their back, first one to finish eating their slice wins.

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Wouldn’t it be great for you, and the rest of your YL/WL team, to get a text message every time one of the other leaders on your team did contact work (and this all happened pretty much automatically)? That is what we have been doing in our area for the last two months and it has been a big encouragement to many. We call it Contact Work Encouragement.

If you have been following along, I have been writing and sharing a lot about contact work, as it is one of the foci of our YL area this year (see the final post in the four part series here). I figured there had to be a way to use technology to help with the accountability aspect, and also to help team leaders so they didn’t have feel like they were beating their leaders over the head every week asking, “did you do contact work this week?” So I created a system in which a leader updates a very brief  form via their phone, and then every leader gets a text message with a brief update. Furthermore, this information is then logged and a summary of all the contact work activity can be seen. We use that information in our monthly area leadership meetings to learn, and highlight, leaders who are doing great contact work.

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A fantastic YL team leader recently told me, “I stopped asking my YL team about contact work because they are sick about me asking them about it… mostly since they don’t do it.” If you’ve been following along my series on contact work, you may have navigated the obstacles of 1) spiritual challenges, 2) timing challenges, 3) fear challenges… hopefully contact work is improving, but how do we keep it going? Here are a couple ideas regarding accountability and contact work:

1. Define Contact Work

Unfortunately, contact work can be vague, or “gray”, not black or white. If I text a kid is that contact work? If I give a kid a ride to club and we chat for a little while is that contact work? If I see them at their work, but I was already going there anyway, is that contact work? In my opinion, yes to all. But, I think each team needs to define contact work. In general, I think it is interacting with students outside of a planned meeting (and always working to meet new people).

2. Make a Commitment to Contact Work

In our area we have a leader covenant that includes a weekly commitment to contact work. We ask people to pray about their commitment before they make it. We believe contact work is one of the ways we fulfill our calling to be ambassadors of Christ and of the great commission, so contact work is not a commitment to “Young Life”, but to our calling from God’s word. (PS Please keep doing “contact work” when the Lord calls you into different ministries after your season in Young Life. It is not a just a YL thing, it is a Bible thing.)

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You may know that I’ve been trying to find a solution for club cards for quite a while. Kids generally don’t mind filling out the card, it is the next step that is difficult… Getting the info to all the leaders in a way they can use it. Last year we would just put a leader’s cell phone (one for guys, one for girls) on the screen during announcements and then had a contest for new kids to text first for a prize. That worked OK.

I’ve come up with a way to have kids input their info on their phone during club and then it automatically updates in all of our leader’s phones. Pretty cool huh? So, a new kid may be sitting in club, and when they submit their info, it automatically updates in the phones of all the leaders sitting next to them. Then leaders can follow up in the following days and thank them for coming, invite them back, etc. (This will also help in the mass exodus by teenagers away from Facebook) I realize this will only work if all of the people involved have smart phones that can get on the web. If I have time in the future I have an idea how to make it work purely by submitting a text message, but that is a little more complicated and I don’t have the time at the moment.

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He plays video games with people across the country he doesn’t know… He hardly knows three people in each class he is in… He still watches cartoons… His mom drives him everywhere… He doesn’t have armpit hair… He has the intelligence level of a freshman in high school… because HE IS A FRESHMAN IN HIGH SCHOOL… And yet you fear him. You are an adult, with lots of friends, likely have a car, and a job, and a high school diploma (or more), and yet a scrawny Hurley t-shirt armpit-hairless wearing 14 year old gives you a look that says “what are YOU doing here?” And you are frozen right there in your steps. This is scarier than the best that Hollywood can pump out during Halloween right?

Nope, but it can feel that way. I can remember purposely strolling up by the gym at my high school to say hi to a kid a barely knew, meanwhile his friends all gave me the crazy-eye-what-are-you-doing-here look. Fast forward a few years and most of those friends came to club and some met Christ. It is worth it, but in the moment we can often be frozen by fear.

Here are some tips to conquer fear in contact work:

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We are now in the forth year of doing club talks through the gospels. We started in Mark, then John, then Luke, and now on to Matthew! Take a wild guess what we will be doing next year… if your guess rhymes with Zark then you are on to something.

You can read more about the philosophy of it all in earlier posts, but Matthew presents unique issues for going through it in a year. The main one is that it includes the largest sermon in the gospels, the sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7). For our club we did campaigner lessons through this while leading up to club. It could be a good option for you over Christmas break or early January when you might not have club. Also, Matthew has 28 chapters, and many clubs don’t have 28 clubs all year, so we had to be selective a little. On the other hand this unique approach does force us to do talks we might not otherwise do… but I am OK with that since these topics are obviously part of the “gospel” in every way we can (or haven’t yet) imagined. Last, there is a strong Jewish aspect that is very intentional in Matthew, we need not avoid this, but some parts might require a little more research for those prepping club talks and we need to think through how to present this in our talks.

Here is our talk outline for the year:

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Virtually every YL leader can answer this question, “When is club?” Virtually every YL leader can answer this question, “When is campaigners?” Virtually every YL leader can answer this question, “When is camp?” But if you were to ask virtually any YL leader the following question, you would likely hear a long pause, “When is contact work?”

Not only are there spiritual obstacles to contact work, there are timing issues as well. In fact, this is a primary reason leaders, including me too, struggle with contact work. Now, the easy fix is simply to schedule it! For those of you that have your contact work scheduled, say donuts on Monday mornings, or helping in the lunch line every other Thursday, or coaching the cross country team in the Fall, then you are set. But, for the vast majority of teams and leaders, they do not have this in place. It might be that their job or school schedule doesn’t allow for it. It might be that the school won’t let you go on campus.

Here are a couple of ideas to overcome this obstacle:

1. Pick a day and time, whether or not anyone is at the school, and just go there to pray.

2. Find a partner to join you, contact work is much easier if you do it in pairs, and it adds accountability.

3. Commit to going to every home game of a certain level (Frosh/JV/Varsity). Many schools use Google calendars and you can import those automatically into most smart phones.

4. In club make one of the game prizes something you deliver to the school (food, snack, t-shirt, etc.) Kids will be counting on you.

5. If you have a recurring event in your life, say you go to the grocery store every Sunday afternoon, invite a student to go with you each week.

6. Set a reminder on your phone/calendar for you to contact a student via text/fb/twitter.

Those are just a couple ideas to help overcome the timing barrier to contact work.

How do you ensure consistent contact work?

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Wanna know why contact work is so hard? Because Satan hates it. Yup, it is pretty much that simple. I can prove it. Try to plan contact work two or three times this week. It won’t go according to plan, I guarantee it. You will get busy, someone will cancel on you, you will be pulled into work, you will have an assignment or test come up, it will start raining like a torrential downpour (like it is right now, so much that I can’t get to the school even though I planned on going there today), an issue will come up at the school (today a principal’s secretary called to tell me we are not welcome there anymore after years of well-received work)… and that is just the beginning. On the surface all of these things SEEM like normal everyday complications, but they are not. Now this doesn’t mean the rain, which was sent by God, is conspiring against YL, or your boss at work is secretly getting plotting against contact work. All I know is that of our primary tools of club, campaigners, camp, etc… Contact work is the most difficult (and the most unique aspect of YL, but that is another post). Here is why:

Romans 10:14-15 How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

2 Cor. 5: 19b-20 And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.

Eph. 6:12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Truths about contact work from these verses:

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I do! Especially this year.

Last year was one of my favorite years in our YL club. Our club had been exploding for years, our campaigners was full and vibrant. We had too many excellent junior leaders than we needed, we couldn’t even use them all! It was awesome. Many have transitioned into leadership training and leadership positions in their freshman year of college locally and across the country. But now… it is a bit of a rebuilding year.

For the past few years my contact work was mostly just trying to keep up with those who “came to us” because of the momentum we had in our club. This year is different, it will be a “go to them” year for sure… which is classic YL and 100% why I am here today writing this post. My leader came to me.

When it comes to contact work, I know what to do. Mostly because it was done for me. But I always want to get better and help those around me get better at contact work. Here are a couple things I am doing:

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In our area school starts really early, August 8^th to be exact. This means that leaders start getting text messages right away saying, “When is club?!?” If we were to start club in the beginning of August we would run out of momentum, interest, and energy for club way before the end of the semester.

Our strategy for the beginning of the year is to have about six weeks of easy hang out events that are mostly contact work related. Then we have an all area dodgeball tournament the Monday after our annual Fall Leader Retreat, with traditional club starting the following week. This allows us to focus our energy on relationships and not events. It also allows us to gauge our numbers for club, campaigners, getting new leaders in place, and more. We do start up campaigners before club, Aug 29^th.

For this year, here are our plans for the next few Mondays…

Aug 12 – Volleyball at the local sports/fun park (costs us $5 for all of us to use a court)

Aug 19 – Nerd Bowling ($10 per person)

Aug 26 – Swim Party

Sept 2 – Labor Day – No Event

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