Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Excellent Camp Follow-Up

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?

Here are a couple of things that I we do for summer camp follow up:

1) Start talking about it at camp. Plan a first post meeting before you go to camp. The last night in cabin time, talk about that meeting.

2) As soon as a kid meets Christ, I invite them to join me for a quiet time the next morning. It begins to teach how they can relate to Christ.

3) If I have a long bus ride home, I will have a mini-campaigners on the bus with kids who have made a commitment to Christ.

4) I have a pre-printed card with information about the first follow-up meeting and give it to kids as the bus pulls into the parking lot. I also have enough to give one to parents.

5) If I am in town, I usually will plan to meet with the kids from my cabin every day for a week. I use it as an extension of cabin time to help bring the close relationship from camp back home.

6) I have done a variety of things with kids. In our area we are committed to large group campaigners, but we make sure that every day, they break down into a sharing time with the kids from their cabin.

7) I have every campaigner kid help by calling the new Christians to invite them to campaigners. I also divide the names among the leaders

8) The Navigator wheel is a good resource to use. I have also walked through one of the gospels (like Mark), teaching what it is like to know Christ. So each night there is the content of that chapter of scripture, and teaching how to take what you read and allow it to influence your life.

9) We usually have a person share briefly from their life as part of the night. A sort of mini-testimony.

10) We meet EVERY week. The only exception would be if the 4th of July falls on a scheduled night, but we would probably go with kids to fireworks. If I have an assignment, this means that I need to get my team on board and ready to lead the group. If I don’t have leaders to do it, I recruit someone who I trust will do a great job.

I think that the community you build is at least as important as what you teach. If you can create a safe place where people are loved and accepted, then kids will want to come.