Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

One of my favorite things about YL is our focus on relationships. Because of that many of the clubs I have been a part of have a natural limit of how many kids will be at club. That is because most of the clubs I’ve been in are relationally-driven. One of the clubs I was in was more about the "scene". This brought in more kids just because it was the thing to do. This is not to say that you couldn’t do both.

I’ve been at my current club for seven years now. It has always been a good size, but nothing huge. I like how it is. This semester we want to give it some hype. To try to get it big, even if just for a little bit. Kinda like a shot of steroids, but legally. By the way don’t do steroids.

• What have you done to hype-up, or get more kids to your club?

This is easily the best camp video I’ve ever seen. From Ashley Maddox, video genius and all around good guy.

Young Life Lost Canyon from W. Ashley Maddox on Vimeo.

Yes! Hot Dog club. We are staging a multi-school hot dog eating contest. It involves four weeks of playoffs to determine each high school’s hot dog eating champion and then a final at a popular local mall stage to determine the north east Phoenix champion. This is the first club to kick it off.

Here is another blob video from somewhere out there. Wait until the end when he goes over and his friend tries to catch him. My friend and fellow leader David B came to mind instantly. He would try it in a heartbeat. Obviously we would never do this.

On assignment for Wyldlife this summer we decided to do a guys hike and a girls talk. We split them up, I led the guys hike so I know a lot about that, but I can get info about the girls identity talk if you are interested.

The theme of the guy’s hike was "how to be a man". When we started the hike, which had five stations, I introduced this idea and, let me tell you, it got their attention. I will go on to explain the details, but beyond the details I learned that there is a deep hunger, especially among junior high guys, to find out what a man is supposed to be like. We need to leverage this more for the sake of the gospel. Help me think of ways to do this better and more often.

As I planned the stations I felt like I was pulling stuff out of the air for the topics. I knew I wanted to say something about how we treat women and a couple other things. But then 1 Tim 4:12 came to mind. It laid the perfect outline for a young man wanting to be a man. I repeatedly mentioned how they may have been looked at like children just a few years ago, but they have the opportunity to act like men. Also acting like a man has nothing to do with age, there are plenty older males out there that act like children. The kids I talked to knew that all too well.

So the stations were:

1. The power of our words
2. Our actions (especially in competition) – Joey Colletti did an incredible job with this station.
3. Selfless Love – Mike Mayfield from our summer staff shared about why he was serving them. They broke into groups and talked about men who had influenced them.
4. Faith – Walk what you talk. Don’t just "know" the right thing.
5. Purity – Especially how we treat women.

At each station we broke up into the cabin time groups and had a question for the leader to answer and a question for the kids in the cabin time.

• How do you think we can leverage the desire to for guys to want to be "men" for the sake of the gospel?
• What do you think they need to hear?

When I was a senior in high school, the staff guy training me told me to learn guitar for club. Whenever he told me to do something I did it. So I went out and taught myself guitar. After a little practice I was playing guitar at club, campaigners and camps. It is a very useful skill.

I quickly came to notice a couple unfortunate club guitar player types… Have you noticed these?

Mr. Abrupt – This person has no idea how to smoothly end a song, or start it. They like to say, "That’s it" after playing the last chord. Like freight train the song stops.

Mr. I-Could-Never-Clap-But-I-Still-Try-To-Play-The-Guitar – This person has a terminal defect that will never improve. No amount of lessons or experience will ever solve it. They are known for getting behind or ahead of the beat. You can notice this person when at some point during the club kids are looking at each other trying to figure out what happened.

Mr. Off-Key – This person does almost everything right except they don’t know how to start a song in the right key. They just need to find one person who can sing the first line right. Here’s a tip, if you start off key… STOP the song and start over.

Mr. Show-Off – My biggest pet-peeve. This person doesn’t realize club guitar is about getting the kids to sing, it is solid rhythm guitar, no more. This person likes to bring more than one guitar to club, always wants to be plugged in, and usually spends the entire pre-club time playing guitar mostly by himself. It is my biggest pet-peeve because they have all the right technical skills down but miss the point of music in club. There is a right time for a little ditty (i.e. Sweet Home Alabama), but they never seem to get that it is not a performance.

Fortunately I never got good enough to be mr. show-off and for some reason I can clap and sing in key (most of the time). What I excelled at is not taking myself too seriously (even with guitar) and always bringing lots of energy. If you do those two things, you will buy time to become solid at all the standard YL songs.

I hope you’ve enjoyed what we are trying to do at ylhelp.com.

One of the founding principles is that we can all benefit from our collective knowledge-base. I have two things in mind I’d like to see grow: subscribers and comments. If those two things can grow, then we all have a better chance of sharing the love (and making our YL planning, ideas and strategies better and easier).

So here is the contest:

1) Send an email to YL friends, leaders, etc about ylhelp.com. Ask them to consider signing up for a subscription at this link: http://ylhelp.com/how-to-get-updates

2) Make a comment at the bottom of this page of how many people you sent it to. I will give you one chance for each person you email, then I put all of them together and I will do a random drawing for a prize pack of some of my new YL stuff that I have (see below). I’ll be using the honor system on this. So basically the more you email the better the chance of winning.

(BTW, I can see your email address but others can’t so it is kinda anonymous)

I will determine the winner on Sept 19th. Have fun!

Clearly violating the 100 pound differential limit and the double (or triple blob) rule. OK, actually it doesn’t look like a YL camp.

Our biggest event each year is our dodgeball tournament. We use it to kick-off the school year. We use a gym that has a full size basketball court and divide it into 4 dodgeball courts. We encourage team uniforms and have refs and everything. I also suggest using real dodgeballs they are safer and more fun to throw then other types of balls. You will need to borrow them or order them and they are $10-15 each, but they are worth it.

Here are some details…

I am leading a seminar at our regional leader retreat next weekend about how to share Christ. I did a similar seminar last year and I got good feedback.

This year I want to focus on investigating what God has already done in their lives. In other words, this person may have never heard of God, or they might be ready to come to know Christ the day you meet them because of other ways God has worked in their life, or they may know Christ and need to be challenged to grow. So the seminar theme might be, "investigating and doing your part" of God’s plan in their life. This might not be "leading them to Christ", though it might be.

This could have a couple benefits, one would be that we don’t just assume that everyone is brand new to the gospel, in fact that is not even biblical. Furthermore statistics tell us most kids have been involved in Christian churches in one way or another. More than that, we will have to be more skilled in our friendship to examine what is needed. It is easier to start at square one then to know them enough to move on.

One other thing I want to include is the idea of a "community sandwich". This is the idea that they are "in" our group, they are accepted, loved, one-of-us, and in the midst of that, we also talk about Christ. We accept them and love them before, during and after any interaction about the gospel. Not a new idea to us, but certainly one that seems to be new for those who think it is a postmodern or emergent approach. 

• What do you think about these ideas?
• What are some of the most helpful concepts you have learned about sharing Christ?
• Does the hamburger above make you hungry? It makes me want In-N-Out right now.