Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

In the next few weeks I want to lay out how we develop our leadership community in our area. I’m hoping it will be helpful for some of you. I doubt what we do is a perfect fit for your community, but there may be some things that you can use, or you can tweak for your YL area. At the moment 85% of our adult leaders used to be club kids in our area. In the past we found that we could add 2-5 leaders per year from various contacts in the community, and we still do that. But, the biggest change has been being very intentional in developing our local leadership in club kids. Here is a high level view of how we do it:

1. Junior junior leaders – We have a select group of 8th graders involved in leading their WL club.

2. Solid campaigners – This should be an assumption, but it isn’t. We must strive to have strong campaigners in every club (and campaigners should be filled with club kids that were met through contact work, not just churched kids who like campaigners, though they are as welcome as anyone to come.)

3. Junior leaders – These are juniors and seniors in high school who go through a 6 week training and interview process the previous year.

4. FYL – First year leading – This is mostly college freshman who were club kids in our area, but often more people and friends join in. We meet for the entire school year for discipleship and training. People are placed as leaders along the way when they are ready.

5. Traditional leader training – Typically this is a four week training meeting once-a-week with various assignments.

Like I said, over the coming weeks, I hope to give a lot more specifics about what we do with each of these. I’ve covered some before on the blog (if interested just use the search feature to find the posts), but I hope to pass along more details as I am often asked about each of these through the blog and email. Also, this is just what we do, there are surely many wonderful things going on out in YL land that could really help the YL community. If you can chime in, we need you! Don’t be shy.

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