Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

At our most recent All Area Leadership meeting, one of our fantastic volunteer team leaders, Alex Devine, did a great lesson on how to balance relationships in YL. He used an approach that has been around for a while but continues to help frame a well-rounded approach to relationships in YL. I first heard of this approach from my friend Rick Wilson as the “circles of three”.

In this model you have three circles and at least three names in each circle. The three circles are 1) Contact Work, or kids who don’t yet go to club, 2) Club, meaning kids who go to club but not much more yet, and 3) Campaigner kids. If you can maintain a focus on at least three people in each circle, you will likely have a good, well-rounded, approach to outreach, gospel proclamation, and intentional discipleship (though all three of those terms have overlap themselves). Read the rest of this entry »

For months I have been using the free version of Spotify and love it. If you don’t know what Spotify is then you should just check it out yourself, but more or less the free version gives you access to over 15 million songs while you have wifi access. They also offer accounts you can pay for at $5 and $10 per month that allow you to use the music when you don’t have wifi, or are offline (I have not used this paid service). It all ties in with Facebook and this and that and whatever and I’m sure it will morph over the months and years to come.

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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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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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