Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

A good friend of mine sent out an email about camp follow-up with ideas he has collected over the years. I thought they were excellent and wanted to pass them along.

What do you do for camp follow-up?

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Would you help me? I am actually very excited and prepared to speak at summer camp (don’t be worried if you are bringing kids when I’m speaking haha). I’ve spoken at summer camp before and lots of weekend camps. And the powers-that-be asked me again, so apparently I don’t suck. But I’d like to get some ideas and feedback from you all. In fact I’m thinking about trying a thing or two that would be a little different then what I’ve seen in YL. I’m willing to share those ideas on ylhelp but I need some confirmation that you will work with me. So, will you help me and, in addition, commit to praying for me while I’m at camp? If you are in, then leave a comment. If I get 10+ comments then I’ll start laying out my ideas. If not, then I’ll save my time for other things. No worries.

Sean

The Leader Panel is a great option in lieu of a club talk. Is it 10 minutes before club and you don’t have Bill Paige or Marty Caldwell around to do the club talk at the last second? BOOM!  Leader Panel! Is it 30 minutes after club has started and your leader who was supposed to do the talk isn’t showing up because they were going to do it but they decided to go to the grand opening for Wolverine at midnight and now are just “too busy” or “too tired” to do it, or even give you a heads up? BOOM! Leader Panel!

But it isn’t just a backup option, it can be a great time for kids to ask questions and for leaders to share. It also can be a good time for the leader who isn’t all that comfortable to do a club talk to share up-front. One club in our area did it a few weeks ago and it was so powerful that some kids came up crying afterwards and wanted to talk more about a relationship with Christ… BOOM! Leader Panel! My club did it last week after some year-end senior testimonies.

Here are a couple tips:

1. Explain it clearly. Tell the students this has the potential to be a really good discussion if they take a minute to think of an honest question.
2. Give them 1-2 minutes to think of a question, play some chill music in the background.
3. Then pass out the cards and I recommend golf pencils (they are cheap).
4. When the kids turn the questions in, have an experienced leader filter the questions and pick leaders to answer them.
5. Expect silly and lame questions and put them aside. The more you can keep the panel discussion on track… the better.
6. If you are worried about too many lame questions, prep a couple questions beforehand to answer.
7. You can use any scrap of paper (we used the back of club fliers last week), but I have also used the following file if you want to use it:

You may have noticed that the updates of the Sync through Mark have slowed down. There are a couple of reasons, but I want to let you know that we hope to continue them in the Fall. In the mean time, we will shirt our focus to summer camping, follow-up and some insights from the year-in-review. BTW… If you have any insights from the year or have something to pass along, let me know.