Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

It has been so much fun to create YLHelp.com! I’ve received so much positive and helpful feedback through the comments, emails and personal conversations. I’m glad it is helping! Also, lately I’ve been receiving lots of great club and game ideas that I’ve been able to pass along. Thanks! Keep them coming. Imagine a team meeting with thousands of the best YL and WL leaders in it… that is what this is meant to be.

If you are new, I wanted to highlight a couple key resources on the site:

Club Plans

These are fully-planned and ready-to-go club plans with all the details.

One great place to start is in this full semester plan you can download.

Here are a couple of the most popular club downloads:

Thug Club

Yellow Club

Birthday Party Club

Club Talks

Our most powerful tool is a clear picture of Christ. If people see who Christ is clearly, they will fall in love with him. Here are a couple popular tools for club talks:

Club Talk Worksheet. From Bible study to talk outline in a worksheet and Bible study that you do on your own. BTW, I hope to put more of these together.

Powerful illustrations:

Blood Diamond

Tom Brady "There’s Got to be More than this…"

Ladder Illustration

Campaigners

There are so many things we can do in Campaigners! The key is making sure we do it. Have food/snacks, have fun, pray, open the Bible together. If you do those it will be great! Here are some tools that have been popular:

Work Crew Weekend Bible Study – This could be 3 or 4 campaigner meetings too.

Cabin Time Continued – 10 Camp follow-up Bible studies for personal use or campaigners meetings.

Getting Them to Talk: Faces Sheet – A sheet to help people describe how they are doing.

Another way to make the most of this site is to subscribe. You can do this through email or an RSS feed. Click here for more information about both. Tell some friends too!

If you are interested in who the heck would make a site like this or if you want to check out my Facebook click here.

Here is a fun idea for a club from my friend AJ in SD…

First and foremost, sell the club for a few weeks so that everyone can try and grow a sick stache (typcially in March and call it Mustache March after Furry February).

Then for games-

Color a mustache on everyone’s finger and have them play a form of Captain, Gunner, Sailor except it’s

Mustache, Unibrow, Sideburns

Mustache – one person stands there while someone else puts their finger under the persons nose

Unibrow – one person stands there, other puts up a mustache, and the other puts up a unibrow

Sideburns – one person stands there and puts up a mustache, other puts up a unibrow, two people put up sideburns on each side.

Pin the mustache on the Area Director (or any leader).

Blind fold kids and give them a mustache that they then try and pin on a picture of the Area Director

Call up game -

If there’s a leader with lots of facial hair (i.e. Josh Fulkes) you can raffle off a chance to get to cut and shave that person’s entire body.

My friend Robert sent these games along. You may have seen some before, but Robert has added in some fun tweaks to them. Thanks Robert!

…

We do something called ugly baby where we pull pantyhose off of kids heads, but we put bibs and diapers on the contestants as well as paper grocery sacks with eye holes punched out of them with a sharpie marker of an “ugly” baby face.  The contestants come out with the bag over their heads, we then have “Vanna White” unveil the contestants one at a time (crowd goes wild), then “Vanna” unveils the ugly babies by pulling up very slow ly the pantyhose off of the each head.  TEARS, hilarious laughter!

Another is the “frozen spoon” gag where you have on the end of the rope a frozen spoon and people have to weave it up and down the isle of peoples shirts, it touches bare skin and it’s cold…OKAY…now hears what we do…we drill a hole in a frozen trout and have it at the end in the bucket where no one knows it’s coming and the line of people are busy with the other items on the rope, boxer shorts, hats, McDonalds toys…and all of a sudden the frozen trout has to come through because the string that the other things were tied to is already up and down their shirts.  Also a screamer…one that kids will never forget!

Have you ever done “rate that kiss?”  You have freshman think that they are going to rate the kiss of some upperclassmen (on the cheek), and they get blindfolded, then you sneak in each of the contestants moms, the upperclassmen step back, mom goes in for the smooch, and sometimes they even plant on on their son’s lips, the audience is dying laughing, while the contestants are clueless…they rate their mom’s kiss a 9/10/11 etc..  Then we unblindfold the contestants…and walla… another gut buster!

Here is a great idea from my friend Steve…

OK, Here’s the deal. It’s a club transition year for us. We have lost leaders due to marriage, grad school, etc. We also graduated our club core group. So we’re starting the year with new leaders, and a small core of kids who don’t usually invite their friends.

Knowing that if you have a bunch of girls, it’s hard to get guys to come, but if you have a bunch of guys, girls will come, we concluded that we need to pump up our guy attendance.

What do guys like? They like to eat and be rowdy. So we are using a contest idea from friends on the east coast. "Eat The Fast Food Menu Night." A couple of our leaders are assistant football and cross country coaches.

We plan to promo the Saturday night gig for two weeks. Get at least 60 kids to show up at the fast food place. (If it really takes off, we’ll buy the entire menu twice and compete against each other) My friend says it took about 30 minutes for 25 kids to eat the entire menu of a Wendy’s. We won’t charge kids, and we’ll give away tee-shirts.

That Monday, we plan to have our first club at the house of a junior guy who is well known and liked. We’ll show a video of Fast Food Night, do a couple club stunts, promo the following week as "coach Luke Night." (one of our leaders who was a division I QB) We plan to show his highlight tape. and finish it off with the ice-cream sundae in the gutter out in front of the house.

The following Monday, (at the same house) It will feel more like club, and we end by showing the highlight video, and the coach does the talk, inviting kids back the following week. 

So, We hype a guy oriented event that is totally marketed to guys who have never come to club. The two meetings after the event are set up as follow-ups. We think the eating event will sell well, and the follow-ups will get the guys in the habit of showing up on Monday nights. That’s our plan.

OK, so basically our economy seems like it was hijacked by Black Bart. I went into a local yesterday Einstein’s Bagels and it was empty. They said is has been very slow and people’s hours were being cut big time. My guess is you are trying to make the most of your money, especially now.

Being a YL leader can cost you a fair amount of money. Here are a couple ideas about how to save money as a YL leader:

• No Starbucks. Some of my friends affectionately call it "Five-Bucks". Not only for yourself, but it is kinda the standard phrase to say, "hey lets do coffee" or "lets do Starbucks". How about meeting at McDonalds? My wife says their iced coffee thing is pretty good. I’ve been meeting people at Wendy’s and we get $0.99 Frosty’s. (Ummm I love Frostys). Basically avoid Starbucks. You can even feel like one of those "down with the establishment" people.
• Paying for school events. Many schools will give you free passes to games if you explain what are you are doing. (Use the word "mentor", they like that). Ask the front desk or teachers or coaches. Your staff person can help with this.
• Carpool to club. Basically carpool everywhere. Maybe ask a kid to pick you up if they can… Why not?
• Fun is free. Dust off the board games and all the stuff you already have. You don’t have to go see movies or anything like that. Also don’t do Pizza Olympics club, that always costs me like $50-75.
• If you expect paying for camp to be a problem, tell you team leader or staff person ASAP! They might be able to help you figure it out if you give them enough time. If you tell them two days for camp then you might be out of luck. Don’t be prideful and don’t wait.

What are some of your ideas how to save money these days?

Our area does a lot of Work Crew weekend trips. We have a YL camp two hours away, so not only do we help at YL camps, we sometimes do Work Crew at non-YL camps also.

The typical tension I’ve seen on Work Crew is work vs. spiritual experience. There is often a lot of work to do on Work Crew (I’m Captain Obvious). The challenge is that the work needs to get done. If it doesn’t get done, camp doesn’t work. So typically all the work gets done. The part that can easily be minimized is the spiritual experience. It is a bummer when occasionally I hear a kid say, "All I did was work my butt off, we never had a meeting, prayed, or did anything like that". It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

I have a couple suggestions:

1. Train the Work Crew bosses well – help them understand both priorities work and spiritual growth.
2. Know when to draw the line on work. Every once in a while tell the camp or the program or whoever is running it, "no, we can’t do that". Explain that you need time to have a meeting or a worship time.
3. Work hard so you have more time for other things.
4. Make the most of when the Work Crew eats. Have a Work Crew boss share their testimony or have "table questions".
5. Have a good meeting plan with a game, worship and small group teaching.

I have put together a basic Bible study for Weekend Camp Work Crew that includes four different sessions or quiet times. Hope it helps!

I heard from some friends about a fun game people did at camp. Basically it is stretching for marshmallows hanging on strings while having a rubber band type thing under your nose. See the video below, but basically you can get some rubber tubing, or surgical tubing I guess is what it is called. They gave me the tip to have kids take off glasses. Looks like fun! Be careful! Thanks for the tip Jonathan!

Get ready to hang ten on this club. OK that was lame to say. My friend Joey did this club the other week and it went really well… Also a chance to revive the Homey the Clown skit… if you are old enough to remember it. Enjoy!

Again from video genius Ashley Maddox and friend Eric Scofield is this video that explains a day at camp. I will be showing this to parents, committee and donors a lot.

Lost Canyon: The Eric Scofield Tour from W. Ashley Maddox on Vimeo.