Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

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.

To counter this challenge I have tried a few things. One thing I have tried, and also seen others do, is to simply pick the scripture and put it in our semester club plan for all to see ahead of time, this way everyone knows exactly what to expect. What we did this year is go through one chapter of the book of Mark each week. So I told our leaders, pick any story that you want out of the chapter we are going through that week. I have worked through the book of Mark a bunch of times and, with the exception of a few chapters in the middle, it is laid out nearly perfect for a traditional semester YL talk sequence. This approach gave the leaders a few stories to pick from in a chapter. It narrowed down the options quickly but allowed them to have the topic be “their own”.

What have you done for topics relating to “person of Christ” talks?

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