Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

In the last year or so others really jumped into the mix online with all things YL. I was amazed as nearly every month another blog or associated Twitter account started posting really great YL stuff! Here are some of the ones I have been really impressed with!

YLPlaybook (@ylplaybook) – The best spot for games and skits!

Young Life Leaders (@YoungLifeLeader) –I pretty much steal all my good ideas from here.

Youth Leader Stash (@ylstash) – Great info for YL and Youth Ministry in general from great dude.

TotalYLmove (@totalYLmove) – Hilarious! If you’ve ever felt odd and alone in YL, you will find you are not alone here.

Official YL twitter (@YoungLife) – The mothership has landed on Twitter! Good info on here from the source!

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Over the summer I normally try to post a couple things that I learned over the previous school year. If you have anything you learned from last year that you would like to tell me about, send it my way smcgever (at) pv dot younglife dot org

Over the years I have noticed a trend with the clubs in our area, the ones that have the most cash deposits in early always bring the most people to camp. Now I don’t believe “having a lot of people at camp” is the holy grail of YL work, and in all honesty it can become an unhealthy idol in our view of our ministry. Yet, I’m sure we can all agree that wanting lots of kids to go to camp is a healthy goal for our work. On the flip side, some of our clubs only make the push to collect actual money a few days before camp. These clubs always have lower numbers of kids at camp.

This year we tried something that I’m sure many of you already do, we gave an incentive to get the deposit in early. For our YL trip we matched up to $50 of a deposit that was in by April 15^th. The deposit from the kids couldn’t be a fundraiser, it had to be actual money.

There was an important reason behind this. When you need actual money, parents usually have to get involved. So many times I’ve seen a kid be a part of several fundraisers, sometimes even earning a significant amount of money, but they don’t go to camp. Usually the culprit is they had none of their own money deposited. They liked hanging out at the fundraisers, maybe did some on their own, but they never had an actual sit-down talk with their parents to ask for the money. This happens less with junior high students since the parents are more in the loop, but this is common with high school students who may be pretty independent, until they need a few hundred dollars.

Our schools that normally bring a lot of kids to camp improved their numbers a little bit, but our schools with historically low numbers did significantly better with this approach.

Do you require a deposit by a certain date? Have you ever matched their money to incentivize signs-ups?

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Over the summer I normally try to post a couple things that I learned over the previous school year. If you have anything you learned from last year that you would like to tell me about, send it my way smcgever (at) pv dot younglife dot org

One of the things I love about YL is that we use volunteer leaders to do a lot of the speaking and talks in our clubs. On occasion I will meet a youth leader or parent who has a great lead for a “guest speaker” for our YL or WL clubs. If the opportunity is right I will let them know that my philosophy is that I would rather have a relatively inexperienced and possibly not the most gifted speaker do the talk if they know the kids in the audience. Another way to say it is, often the person I want speaking up front is the person who knows the most kids in the audience personally. Kids listen to people who know them personally, and we extend the impact of a simple talk through the ongoing relationship of the leader and student. Our goal isn’t only the “best talk”.

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Over the summer I normally try to post a couple things that I learned over the previous school year. If you have anything you learned from last year that you would like to tell me about, send it my way smcgever (at) pv dot younglife dot org

Our talk sequence for club is pretty traditional. Normally we do an intro talk, an incarnation talk, a bunch of “person of Christ” talks, then sin, cross, resurrection, coming to Christ, living for Christ… that sort of thing.

All of those topics lend themselves to pretty obvious scriptures, Bible stories, main points, etc… except one. The “person of Christ” talks are the bread and butter of YL talks. It allows us to talk about the most amazing person in the history of the world. I love these talks. The challenge is that it is a rather broad topic. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a leader who has been through leader training and talk training ask me for the n’th time, “what exactly am I supposed to be talking about?” And I don’t have the stats to back it up, but I almost never get the dreaded Monday afternoon “I’m not ready for my talk” call about the incarnation, sin, cross, resurrection, etc… but I do get that call about the “person of Christ” talk more than the rest. I think the problem again lies in that the topic is very open-ended and broad.

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