Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Here is a question a friend of mine would like some feedback on…

Would you have club at a fast food place?

• Would you have it there once?
• Would you have it there for an entire semester?
• What would be the pros/cons?
• If you’ve done it, any recommendations?
• Any funny stories?

Here is my experience… I’ve done club several times at Taco Bell, at a local kids pizza place (Peter Piper Pizza), and maybe somewhere else. I’ve found that these places are very open to having an event on a Monday night if it brings people in. I’ve also been very upfront with them about the songs, the talk, etc. Nothing has phased them. On the plus side I’ve seen people who are just eating there really interested in who we are. On the challenging side, I have at times been worried that a stranger or two was being a little too interested in some of the teenage girls. It is a hard place for proclamation, but I like the oddity of it… Something feels right to me to be at a public place in our community talking openly about Christ to our friends. I’ve never tried more than one meeting a semester doing this.

I’m very eager to hear your input, and I know some of my friends are too… Can you help us by proving some comments?

My friend Robert sent these games along. You may have seen some before, but Robert has added in some fun tweaks to them. Thanks Robert!

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We do something called ugly baby where we pull pantyhose off of kids heads, but we put bibs and diapers on the contestants as well as paper grocery sacks with eye holes punched out of them with a sharpie marker of an “ugly” baby face.  The contestants come out with the bag over their heads, we then have “Vanna White” unveil the contestants one at a time (crowd goes wild), then “Vanna” unveils the ugly babies by pulling up very slow ly the pantyhose off of the each head.  TEARS, hilarious laughter!

Another is the “frozen spoon” gag where you have on the end of the rope a frozen spoon and people have to weave it up and down the isle of peoples shirts, it touches bare skin and it’s cold…OKAY…now hears what we do…we drill a hole in a frozen trout and have it at the end in the bucket where no one knows it’s coming and the line of people are busy with the other items on the rope, boxer shorts, hats, McDonalds toys…and all of a sudden the frozen trout has to come through because the string that the other things were tied to is already up and down their shirts.  Also a screamer…one that kids will never forget!

Have you ever done “rate that kiss?”  You have freshman think that they are going to rate the kiss of some upperclassmen (on the cheek), and they get blindfolded, then you sneak in each of the contestants moms, the upperclassmen step back, mom goes in for the smooch, and sometimes they even plant on on their son’s lips, the audience is dying laughing, while the contestants are clueless…they rate their mom’s kiss a 9/10/11 etc..  Then we unblindfold the contestants…and walla… another gut buster!

One of my favorite things about YL is our focus on relationships. Because of that many of the clubs I have been a part of have a natural limit of how many kids will be at club. That is because most of the clubs I’ve been in are relationally-driven. One of the clubs I was in was more about the "scene". This brought in more kids just because it was the thing to do. This is not to say that you couldn’t do both.

I’ve been at my current club for seven years now. It has always been a good size, but nothing huge. I like how it is. This semester we want to give it some hype. To try to get it big, even if just for a little bit. Kinda like a shot of steroids, but legally. By the way don’t do steroids.

• What have you done to hype-up, or get more kids to your club?

When I was a senior in high school, the staff guy training me told me to learn guitar for club. Whenever he told me to do something I did it. So I went out and taught myself guitar. After a little practice I was playing guitar at club, campaigners and camps. It is a very useful skill.

I quickly came to notice a couple unfortunate club guitar player types… Have you noticed these?

Mr. Abrupt - This person has no idea how to smoothly end a song, or start it. They like to say, "That’s it" after playing the last chord. Like freight train the song stops.

Mr. I-Could-Never-Clap-But-I-Still-Try-To-Play-The-Guitar - This person has a terminal defect that will never improve. No amount of lessons or experience will ever solve it. They are known for getting behind or ahead of the beat. You can notice this person when at some point during the club kids are looking at each other trying to figure out what happened.

Mr. Off-Key - This person does almost everything right except they don’t know how to start a song in the right key. They just need to find one person who can sing the first line right. Here’s a tip, if you start off key… STOP the song and start over.

Mr. Show-Off - My biggest pet-peeve. This person doesn’t realize club guitar is about getting the kids to sing, it is solid rhythm guitar, no more. This person likes to bring more than one guitar to club, always wants to be plugged in, and usually spends the entire pre-club time playing guitar mostly by himself. It is my biggest pet-peeve because they have all the right technical skills down but miss the point of music in club. There is a right time for a little ditty (i.e. Sweet Home Alabama), but they never seem to get that it is not a performance.

Fortunately I never got good enough to be mr. show-off and for some reason I can clap and sing in key (most of the time). What I excelled at is not taking myself too seriously (even with guitar) and always bringing lots of energy. If you do those two things, you will buy time to become solid at all the standard YL songs.

I hope you’ve enjoyed what we are trying to do at ylhelp.com.

One of the founding principles is that we can all benefit from our collective knowledge-base. I have two things in mind I’d like to see grow: subscribers and comments. If those two things can grow, then we all have a better chance of sharing the love (and making our YL planning, ideas and strategies better and easier).

So here is the contest:

1) Send an email to YL friends, leaders, etc about ylhelp.com. Ask them to consider signing up for a subscription at this link: http://ylhelp.com/how-to-get-updates

2) Make a comment at the bottom of this page of how many people you sent it to. I will give you one chance for each person you email, then I put all of them together and I will do a random drawing for a prize pack of some of my new YL stuff that I have (see below). I’ll be using the honor system on this. So basically the more you email the better the chance of winning.

(BTW, I can see your email address but others can’t so it is kinda anonymous)

I will determine the winner on Sept 19th. Have fun!

As the summer approaches fast, it is very helpful to look back and think about what we’ve learned. This gives praise to God and all that He has done. It is also being a good steward of our time, there is no reason we should keep repeating the same mistakes and there is every reason to repeat what works!

So I’d love to hear what worked for you in:

• Club (plans, events, promotion)
• Campaigners (times, places, format, what kind of studies, other things you did)
• Camp (promotion, prep, at camp, camp followup)
• Talks (illustrations, Bible stories, other ways to do talks, i.e.leader panel)
• Contact Work (events, tips, success stories)
• Leadership (recruitment, team meetings, helping each other grow)

Those are just a couple ideas. Let’s share! Over the summer I will post at least one thing I learned this year each week. So my question is…

WHAT DID YOU LEARN THIS SUMMER?

I have to be honest. I’ve never seen one episode of Hannah Montana. But I know that it is crazy popular. What does YL do with silly trendy pop stars… we make mock skits of them of course.

With Summer Camp around the corner, let me suggest the following idea which you can tweak to work for yourself.

In case you don’t know, Hannah Montana is the alter-ego of Miley Stewart. Miley is an average girl by day but a famous pop singer by night, Hannah Montana.

How about this. Riley Stewart is a normal high school student by day, but a bigger than life star by night, Banana Montana.

Two characters played by two leaders (or maybe one). Each club they come out one at a time and talk about their favorite parts of camp. Riley highlights the normal part and Banana takes it to the next level.

For example: the blob. Riley says how he is excited to blob his friend, maybe he will blob her 10 feet in the air, “oh and be sure to bring your sunscreen”. (Kinda the nerdy side). Then Riley walks out the door and Banana Montana comes in to loud music. “Waaaaiiit a second… The BLOB… I’M GONNA GO CRAZY ON THAT THING!” You get the idea. You play off the low key to crazy contrast. Maybe, if you have a host or leader who is being interrupted, the leader can play both parts with a super fast costume change. Then the leader give Banana the boot.

Then each week, change the part about camp to highlight. Maybe you show up as Banana Montana on campus and sign autographs.

Did I mention that Banana Montana is in a Banana suit and hands out bananas? Yeah, that should help. The Banana song too.

I just got an iPhone and I love it! The interface is unbelievable. Some of the applications like the Google Map integration and the Facebook iPhone web-app have been really useful.

There are a couple things I’m trying to figure out to maximize it for YL usage. Maybe this will be in the iPhone 2.

1) Is there a better way to group text message? Right now you can pick the individuals for a multi-person text, but not a way to manage a group. The Treo had a great free program to do this.

2) How to best organize my contacts on the phone. I have a lot of contacts, over 1100. As far as I know the iPhone doesn’t do any sorting or categories. One of my leaders enters club kids phone numbers with "YL" in front of the name. (i.e. YL - John Smith) This way they are all together and easy to find.

QUESTION: How do you organize your club kids names for easy retrieval? Also, any iPhone tips would be appreciated.

Many of you already know this, but Myspace is losing its grip on being the "in" thing for students. Facebook is all the rage.

I overhead a group of 17-20 year olds last night… "Braa, I never check Myspace anymore. I can’t remember the last time I did".

It seems like the younger the person, the more likely they are to be into Myspace, while the older they are the more they are into Facebook. This makes sense since Facebook was originally a college-based site.

I think we will see more and more high school students moving to Facebook, and soon Wyldlife kids too. If you use Myspace to connect with students, you might want to consider Facebook if you haven’t already.

Are you seeing this too?

OK, I’m no fashion genius. I still own a pair of Birkenstocks, they are rather comfy. But I do spend a lot of time around high school folk and I notice things. One thing I notice is that they like to text, listen to ipods and cuss a lot. But that isn’t what this post is about. This post is about fashion.

Neon is an up-and-coming color for shirts these days. Also simple geometric designs or simple lines. Simply take a nice soft shirt, draw some lines or things you can do in Microsoft Word or even that "Paint" program that came in the 386 computers, add some neon colors and BANG… Instant cool. Add a YL logo and BANG… Camp t-shirt.

(All these shirts can be found HERE)