Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Last Saturday we planned out our Fall 2011 clubs. I’ve mentioned it before but here is how we do it:

1. I ask each leader to come with three new fully planned themed clubs (mixer, game, skit, additional fun things to spice it up)
2. I write all of their ideas on a board with minimal explanation (do this part quick)
3. We review the list to see if there are any obvious clubs that are basically the same, and then combine them
4. I have everyone take a piece of paper and write down their top 5 (you could do as many as works for you obviously)
5. This part may sound lame, but… I have them close their eyes and raise their hands as I say each club and I write down how many people voted for it (I don’t want people to think their idea was bad or know who did or did not vote for their ideas)
6. When we are done I circle the top ideas. This semester we needed nine new clubs.
7. Since I am the senior leader, I make some executive decisions about some of the clubs, but usually 95% of it is what we vote for.
8. We then break up into teams and plan the clubs in detail.
9. We finally come back together, explain our plans, tweak the ideas as a group and write them down.

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Here is another great post from my wife!

I love getting to host club in our home! It’s my way of getting to be involved even though I’m not currently leading Young Life. We’ve had club here for 2 years now and I’ve learned a few practical lessons along the way that help kids feel more comfortable and help me manage the chaos of so many people moving through our house.

• A well-placed trash can (or two or three) saves TONS of time in clean up! If kids can find a place to put their garbage without having to ask someone, they will usually throw their stuff away instead of leaving it laying around. Good places include in the club room (or right next to it), next to the door where kids walk in, and on the patio during outside clubs.

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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

I hope you all have a lot to say about this one!

As you may have picked up, I tend to have lots of ideas. Some good, some not so good, but either way I love ideas! You may have also realized I am from Arizona and in the Western Division of YL. I’d say I am very, maybe even extremely, familiar with most of the “norms” and standard approaches to club, campaigners, camp, assignments, etc. as we do them here on the West coast. So when I end up interacting with people from another part of the country who do YL differently I get really excited to be exposed to new ideas. I might not always like them, and lets be honest, we usually like “our” ideas better due to familiarity, but there is more than one way to skin a cat (I think they say that in some parts of the Carolinas?)

From time to time I get to experience these new ideas. This year I was part of a training class at Lost Canyon in the Spring, and as you might imagine, a lot of people from the frozen East coast came to Arizona looking to thaw out. Ironically it snowed, but that is another story. But, of the 150 or so people there, only five or so of us were from the Western Division. I loved hearing all the ideas and norms from their parts of the country. Then this summer we took our YL kids to summer camp that was being led by the Southern Division. Once again I saw all kinds of different approaches and ideas that had great reasons behind them. I even took some of those things and incorporated them into my assignment (war room in the afternoon, WC leads the new Christian walk, other things too). Even on this blog I have seen people chime in on some things such as how cabin unity outfits have become too competitive in other parts of the country, which generally isn’t the case at camps I go to regularly.

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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 most important pieces of our leadership approach in our area is the use of junior leaders. Junior leaders are juniors or seniors in high school who become “jr leaders” in our Wyldlife or Young Life clubs. They receive 6-8 weeks of training and go through an interview process. Currently about 30% of our adult leaders were once junior leaders in our area. Also, just for reference, 60% of our current adult leaders went through our freshman in college Bible study and leadership training program, FYL.

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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

You know how it is easy to miss something once, but then when you hear it twice, three times, then over and over you start to think… there must be something to this! This year in our area we had to two themes that kept coming up.

The first theme was to “pray big”. Many of us are familiar with Ephesians 3:20, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…” But I think we often do not put this into our prayers or expectations. Maybe we don’t pray this way because we have prayed this way in the past and it didn’t work out, maybe we don’t pray this way because we feel selfish to ask for something so lofty and great. Listen here… Pray big and don’t stop praying big! Many of us prayed big this year in the lives of students, in the lives of leaders, in our own lives. Go “over-the-top” in your requests, you can’t over-ask God. One of my favorite book titles of is “Your God is Too Small” by JB Phillips. We do not want to be under-praying, you never know what you may be leaving on the table, as James says, “you do not have, because you do not ask” (James 4:2).

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