Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

One of my favorite baseball players growing up was Darryl Strawberry. I even traded a Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie card for a Strawberry 1984 Topps one time (now the Griffey is 10x its value). Anyway… One thing I loved about Darryl was that he hit for power and could steal bases. He was consistently in the 20/20 club and was on the verge of a 40/40 season one year (that is home runs and steals). For some reason this combination has fallen from the spotlight in baseball.

What do you think about this about a stat… Names and contact work trips in a semester (season). So you could be a member of the 10/5 club after you learned 10 new names and went to do contact work five times. Here are a couple details:

Names – They cannot be names that you already know. This would be only new names.

Contact Work Trips – This would be times when you do contact work and encounter kids outside of club or campaigners. There is a value to texting, Myspace and Facebook connection, but for this plan it would not include those. This could include shopping at the mall where kids hang out and intentionally going through the food court where they all hang out (Level 1 Contact Work = Be Seen).

I have a couple questions:

1. How could you keep track of all this? When? Where? How? Before club? Email?

2. It would be fun once a month (Area Leadership) to have awards for certain plateaus. What would be good levels? What would be good awards?

Is this a good idea or too focused on numbers?

Here are some club talk scriptures and possible themes. Hope they help!

Know your scripture inside and out. One tip is to print it out on paper and then write all over it. Make sure you know the key words and pay attention to the verbs in the story.

I’d like to highlight some good people out there in the YL world…

1. Leader Lounge (www.leaderlounge.com) This is a great site by people who understand and do YL. They have skit stuff, intelligent discussion about ‘dem youths, and other helpful links and all. This resource has been around a lot longer than ylhelp.com, if you can’t find what you are looking for here, they probably have it.
2. Chad Swanzy (chadswanzy.blogspot.com) Chad seems to know what is going on in the world of YL and youth ministry more than I do. He also highlights his family and personal adventures. You will find a combination of practical helps and odd and interesting tidbits. He also invented this Hawk-a-sausage game, pretty cool.
3. Retro Fashions (www.fashionablyretro.com) I’m not gonna lie, my buddy has a sweet t-shirt company that makes the coolest custom shirts for YL and elsewhere. He also has a sweet line of shirts I’m not gonna mention right now. If you need shirts, ask for a design and quote, you won’t be disappointed. He’s also prop’in ylhelp.com so that is nice of him.

We decided to celebrate everyone’s birthday this week at club. We convinced everyone that Monday was their birthday. I was on campus and kids were saying, "Happy Birthday Sean!" I even heard kids saying it to each other. It definitely created some hype around campus.

You can see the attached club for the details. The highlight was probably the leader piñata. Here is a picture to give you an idea…

Last Monday we did Toilet Paper Club. It was a shorter club, then we Tee-pee-ed our rival high school.

We asked each student to come with one or two rolls of toilet paper and camo gear.

The other club let us get them for a few minutes and then ran out with pillows and squirt guns. Pretty fun. Make sure you have rides all lined-up and parents in the loop.