Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Contact Work is the most distinctive and unique part of the YL tool belt. Few others do it, and even fewer do it the way YL leaders do Contact Work. Yet, it is also the most challenging aspect of leadership for most leaders in YL.

I am the product of great Contact Work, in fact my first day of ever hearing about YL was the first day that a new leader was sent out to do Contact Work. It is the purest form of our sacred work. As I like to say, the highest “title” anyone in YL can have is “Visitor”, and this comes in the form of a disposable sticky-backed label handed out at a front desk. It comes in lots of other forms too, and that is where the creative genius of our highest ranking comrades excel.

Any reader of YLhelp has seen that I don’t have Contact Work all figured out. Just follow this link to see me wrestling with all sorts of ideas over the years. Here is my latest idea…

A deck of cards with a different Contact Work challenge on each card. I put a lot of thought into them and decided to call them “Contact Work Cards”. The idea was born out of an article I read on how some people overcome fear and anxiety by setting up small goals for each day. As it turns out, when you make a small, specific, goal, there is a much better chance that you will make progress. You may fail or forget occasionally but overall a lot of progress is made through this approach. This is the general idea behind Contact Work Cards. The primary challenge to quality Contact Work is that is a pure form of incarnational ministry rooted in the imitation of Jesus and fueled by the power of the Spirit, and because of this Satan hates Contact Work. On a practical level, most people don’t have Contact Work regularly planned, unlike weekly club and campaigners, and because of this it simply is hard to fit in. Furthermore, many people simply aren’t sure what to do. Each of the 54 cards are written to overcome these obstacles. One important note: friendship is not a “game”, getting to know kids is not just a “challenge”, it must be genuine.

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Some of you know that I’ve put a few booklets together to help with campaigners and camp follow-up. Well, I have a new one called Wyld Questions. It is aimed at Wyldlife campaigners and I’ve been fortunate to have tried it out last summer in my area and also get great feedback from some of the best Wyldlife leaders from around the country to make it better.

If you are interested in checking it out, you can get more details, download an excerpt, order one, and read some feedback I’ve received here:

http://ylhelp.com/booklets/wyld-questions

If you want to read about the other booklets, you can start here.

Here is part of the introduction I wrote…

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A while back I posted about our Junior Junior Leader Training as part of our overall Leadership Development plan in our area. Since then I’ve updated our training and thought I’d outline it here.

Similar to before this is for committed 8th graders and it is an invitation-only event. At this training here is what I did:

1. Read and briefly walked through John 15:1-5, with the main point being: To be a great WL junior junior leader you need to stay connected/abiding in Christ (this is our #1 leadership principle for all levels of leadership in our area).
2. We played a game (electricity, see below). I used it as an illustration about how the source (the first person in the line) is critical to pass the fruitful information along. The source (the leader) impacts everyone else, this is the role of the leader, to remain focused on Christ.
3. Then I continued by giving them the handout (see below) and walking through it.
4. I finished by giving them time to fill it out and then move into gender-specific small groups with their leaders to discuss further.
5. I also gave them all a small gift (a custom YL lanyard for our area) and prayed for them.

Here is the handout for the training: Junior Junior Leader Training Handout (Updated)

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I hope this post really clicks with you… It probably will if you are a serious nerd like me. In addition to using Bluetooth to wirelessly run our club music, another thing that has helped a lot is to use a remote for our song/announcements presentation on our computer.

If you use a computer to run your slides then you know the challenge of needing someone to be with the computer at all times to: 1) click the next slide, and 2) protect the computer from having a 16 year old guy who has never done a chore in his life mindlessly break almost everything in your club area/house/blinds/piano/guitar/computer (not that I speak from experience anyone doing that to our stuff at club or anything…ahem). All that to say, it is nice to tuck your computer in a safe place and control it remotely.

In the past I tried to use an app called “Slideshark” but honestly it was just bit too cumbersome for us to use on a week-to-week basis, though you might want to give it a look. I also wanted to use Keynote from my iPad but in order to control it remotely you have to use an iPhone/touch with Keynote on it. I have that on my phone but the people I ask to control the presentation don’t always have that so we don’t use that. What works best for us is for me to set it all up and then hand the remote to a junior leader. Here are the two I’ve been using:

1. SMK-Link Pilot Pro Presenter Remote

2. Targus Multimedia Presentation Remote (amp09us)

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If you want to reach “every kid” you can’t do it alone… but too many try that and wear themselves out while unfortunately not reaching all that many. The Master Plan of Evangelism is a classic study on how Jesus called, trained, and sent others to spread the net far and wide. To reach “every kid” we need to develop great leaders. Here are two things that every area should consider for the Spring…

1. Junior Leaders

2. FYL (First Year Leadership)

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One of the keys to a smooth club is to control the down time, this is the time before club, in the transitions between the parts of club, and after club. People simply stay more in tune with what is going on when something is happening either visually or audibly. When kids are arriving it is great to have background music playing, it just makes it less awkward, especially for newer people. In between the parts of club, say from a game into a skit, it helps a ton to have some music play the instant the game is over… think of talk shows like Jimmy Fallon, the band always begins the song the second after he ends an interview with a person or as soon as his monologue is finished. I’m guessing at this point you are saying… yes, yes, I know all that…

The thing I’ve found really helpful in the last year is to control the music from my phone, using Spotify, via Bluetooth back to our sound system. So whether I am welcoming new kids, just finished playing guitar for a song, or am watching a skit from the crowd, I can make sure those transitions are tight. Obviously you can give this task to almost anyone, but they need to be on top of it. I’ve found that no one has an ear for the down time as much as I do, so I usually do it myself since it is so easy.

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Relationships and stories, these are two of the most powerful tools we use in Young Life. Double Happy Double Crappy (DHDC) is one way we leverage that for the gospel and discipleship in our area.

In our campaigners each week we break up into groups and everyone gets to share their “high/low”, or their high point and low point of the last week. Over the years, “high/low” has been renamed “happy/crappy”, a happy and a crappy thing going on in the last week. Apologies if “crappy” isn’t your style, you don’t have to use it! Students look forward to sharing brief stories about their lives and it helps us all grow our friendships and relationships.

In our FYL group each week we hear a life story each week until we have heard everyone’s story. At the beginning of the year I give a couple tips and guidelines about how to do this effectively and either my wife or I go first to give them a model as an example. For many people this is a challenging and faith-building experience. One simple guideline is that I tell them to aim for the “10 minute version” of their story (in the beginning I share a little about the 2/5/10/30min and 2 hours version of your life story and when each is appropriate). I have learned over doing this for almost a decade in our FYL group now to put a timer up that they can see so they have a sense of time. Before the timer there were a couple times the stories went painfully long.

One thing we know about our leadership community is that they love “community”. When we talk to them and when we’ve done surveys we always find two things. First, the thing that they enjoy the most is “community”. Second, the thing they want more of is “community”. This is no joke, they have an insatiable appetite to know each other and be known. Since we have several teams of YL, WL, and YoungLives clubs in our area many leaders have said that they want to know other leaders better too. But time is limited and we have lots of important things we need to cover in our monthly area leadership meetings.

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This is a great club that overlaps with great contact work. It takes a few weeks to put together but can grab the attention of new people too. It is based around the old game show “Family Feud”. Basically you aim to survey 100 students on several different questions and then your club revolves around playing Family Feud with the answers from the students themselves.

Take a look at our club plan below, but there are two things that will help you a lot.

First, the main way we got responses was through our online survey. We created this as a Google Form and sent it out via Twitter, Facebook, text, etc. You can also make a hard copy and hand them out at club, during contact work, etc.

Here is a link to a form you can copy and edit as your own (be careful as this link is to my example form, if you edit it someone else can use this link to edit it later, make a copy of it and then use the copy to edit your own).

FORM YOU CAN EDIT (COPY FIRST TO CREATE YOUR OWN)

EXAMPLE OF WHAT STUDENTS SEE

During club you need a PowerPoint file to play the game. I’ve attached the one I use, which works on a PC. To change the answers just move the box with the number which is layered over the answer. It comes complete with buzzer sounds and more. If you try to use this PowerPoint file on a Mac, my Mac friends say that it doesn’t always work correct. Maybe the YL Mac majority out there can make a similar file in PowerPoint Mac or Keynote and pass it along.

Family Feud Power Point

And last, here is our club plan which is basically based around playing Family Feud:

Family Feud Club

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PS… If you are looking for campaigner resources see this post and maybe this too.

Two things come up over and over on this blog… I like going through the gospels for club talks (and campaigners… see here and here and here) and I like collaboration. It was only a matter of time before I combined the two.

This year in our area all of our clubs are going through the Gospel of Luke. I have identified a specific passage in each chapter for us to teach (see the document below). I then created a Google Doc (see example here) with the list of talks and our team leaders assigned talks for the semester (we will do the same for the Spring when we get closer). For Wyldlife we had them just pick one of the chapters that is closest to their dates since they meet less often.

After the talks were assigned, we had an all area club talk training seminar, similar to what we have done in years past, but we had breakout groups, four chapters of Luke at a time (then we switched), with a person who had prepared to lead each group, and everyone in our area who is doing that talk, and they went through the passage and discussed ideas about how to do a club talk on that passage. If that was confusing, think of it this way… If you were assigned the calling of Levi the tax collector (5:27-32), you met up with a veteran leader and all the other leaders in the area who will also be doing this talk. During this time you worked through the passage, brainstormed ideas, shared your own, etc. We did this for all of the odd chapters of Luke (we do the odd in the Fall and the even in the Spring). This also created a community of people who will be praying for each and continuing to share ideas as their talks approach.

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We are working through the Topical Memory System (TMS) verses from the fantastic Navigators plan. These have a long history in Young Life, in fact several years ago (with less hair and 30 extra lbs) I unearthed the old archives of Jim Rayburn in the Wheaton College collection and found an original TMS packet Rayburn developed with Dawson Trotman of the Navigators. If you are interested in some of the other stuff I found, you can read here, here, here, here, and here.

Our area is working through two verses a month, all of our discipleship cohort people are doing the same with their mentors.

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