Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Christmas Talk

I was having an email conversation with my friend Stacy from Santa Barbara about club talks around Christmas.

What do you do around Christmas? Do you just do standard club talks, do you change it up?

I’ve done a few things, here are a couple ideas:

For an incarnation theme, you could talk about how we all talk about Santa coming down from somewhere up north and literally into our homes. Obviously this sounds a lot like the incarnation! In this theme you could read the words to "Santa Clause is coming to town", they are a bit creepy actually! You can compare how God is quite different.

We have done a gift exchange at the end of club and the biggest present is part of the club talk. Inside a large gift wrapped box is simply the Bible and you read about God’s greatest gift to us in His Son.

You could talk about God’s free gift of new life… "do you want to accept the gift"?

I always re-ask my children during this time of year, "who’s birthday is it"? They all know it is Jesus’. Then I ask them, "who then should be getting the gifts?" They always respond with Jesus. Then we talk about how we can live for God and serve Him and others during this part of the year.

You can have leaders and/or students read the Christmas story in Luke. Here is what we did in my WL club last week:

Read Luke 2:1-20

Readers:

Luke 2:1-12 Juan

Luke 2:13-15 Julia

Luke 2:16-20 Vince

Another thing we have done is have an open sharing time for students. I might ask a campaigner kid to be ready to share to get it started. Sometimes you will be amazed what kids have to say. It could end up being a great gift to the leaders.

What have you done around Christmas time for the talk?