Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

I hope you enjoy YLHelp.com. I don’t do this often, but I wanted to let you know about some booklets that I have written. On YLHelp I’ve posted 258 different posts full of ideas that you can read and use anytime. Enjoy! Here are some other resources that might help your campaigners, one-on-one discipleship or Bible studies. I know many of you have been ordering these for your Fall campaigners.

Cabin Time Continued

This booklet is a series of lessons that are geared for camp follow-up. It reviews the main topics we normally cover at camp and then a few critical first topics for getting start in Christ. A lot of people have brought these to camp to give to kids at the end of the week, or to use right when they get back. Each lesson can also be used on its own, apart from camp. I just used one for a weekend retreat for college kids to use for their morning devotional.

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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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In my YL area we are going 110% on camp prep right now. One of our trips is less than two weeks away and another trip is not long after that.

Here are some popular re-posts that might help with your camp prep…

Camp unity outfits

http://ylhelp.com/2010/05/30/camp-unity-outfits/

Camp shirts

http://ylhelp.com/2010/05/01/summer-camp-shirts/

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I recently had the privilege of teaching two seminar sessions on how to dig deeper in scripture at the YL Western Division Student Staff weekend. This is a topic I love to talk about, I even teach a class on it at a local university. Those who attended asked me to post some of my notes. I have included similar notes on another post about how to study scripture while crafting a club talk. You can find that post here.

Here are two websites I shared:

Blue Letter Bible

Bible Maps

Here are my notes, which are pretty rough, but I hope they are helpful:

I am happy to announce that Live Like This Part 2 is now available.

Thank you to everyone for your encouraging emails and comments about Live Like This Part 1. I have continued to find the wisdom found in the Sermon on the Mount to be challenging and rewarding not only in the small groups I lead, but also personally. We have even adapted this study for a married Bible study group and for large college YL ministry small groups.

I trust that Live Like This Part 2, the second and final installment of a Bible study through the topics found in the Sermon on the Mount, will continue the style and approach of Live Live This Part 1.

If you would like more information CLICK HERE.

For those of you who have followed YLHelp for a while, you probably have seen that I have published a booklet for camp follow-up called Cabin Time Continued. It is a series of 10 Bible studies perfect for when you come home from camp. I’ve seen people use it just for normal campaigners too. In fact I’ve used it twice in the last week as a part of one of our team meeting Bible studies.

I’d like to announce a new resource I have published. It is called Live Like This. Live Like This is a study through the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is a fantastic study, especially for those in campaigners since it is simply the teaching of Jesus. I’ve divided the booklet in two parts. Right now Part 1 is available and Part 2 should be done this summer. If you would like more information on either of these resources check out this page.

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Here are a couple links from my friend Andi who is on staff in NorCal. 

www.biblemap.org

A very cool Google map organized by Bible book, chapter and verse, "It would be great for campaigners".

www.bibleplan.org

Lots of leaders have never read through the Bible, but want to. This can help you get a plan to do that.

Here is a tip…

Often a Gospel story will be a little too long to keep kids attention if you read the whole thing. Here are some ideas…

1. Find “break points”. These are places where you can stop to clarify what is happening in the story, any confusing terms (i.e. Pharisee, disciple, etc.), and to paraphrase it yourself. You can even draw a line in your Bible so you remember where to stop.
2. Find the key phrases and just paraphrase the rest. A great example of this is the cross story. It is simply to long to read in its entirety. Find the key phrases that you need to read out of the Bible. By the way, NEVER paraphrase the whole story, always read out of your Bible when giving a talk.
3. Read the beginning of the story early in your talk, then tell a personal story, application, etc and leave the ending for the end. This can build anticipation and draw more attention to the story. A good example of a story like this is the Woman caught in adultery. Leave them with people with rocks raised over their heads wondering what is going to happen next

I had the privilege of hearing from Dr. Tim Brown of Western Seminary (Holland, MI), last week. He, like Dale Bruner for those who know him, recites long passages of scripture for the majority of his messages. I’ve seen him do the Sermon on the Mount and other long sections. I won’t tell you how many, but he has many complete books of the Bible memorized, not just the short ones.

I’ve heard him several times, but I finally decided to ask him, “How do you do it?” He said he just gets lucky and remembers it after reading it once. Just kidding, he actually said there are five ancient practices that have been used for thousands of years for oral tradition. I believe he is writing a book or a chapter of a book on this. I’ll let you know when it comes out.

1. Say it aloud. Go somewhere where you can say it. You probably need to be alone so you don’t freak people out.
2. Repetition. I knew this was coming, yes the hard work of going over it over and over.
3. Mnemonic Devices. Since I was an engineer I thought he was going talk about pumps and device controls with differential equations. This is what he actually said.-Write out the verse on paper over and over.
   -Make acronyms. For example if you wanted to remember “love, joy, peace, patience…” in the fruit of the Spirit, this would be L.J.P.P
   -Draw little pictures. He said like hieroglyphics. So for the fruit of the Spirit you could draw a heart (love), a happy face (joy), a peace symbol (peace) and so on. In the deciding what to draw you actually are creating mental memory points that will help you. Another example is the classic One-Verse Evangelism from Navigators

4. Take breaks. Work on it for 20 minutes, then take a 10 minutes break, then work on it again. Taking a break helps clear the mind and actually helps you remember it better than if you worked on it 50 minutes straight. So 20 + 10 + 20 > 50 if you like math talk.
5. Hand motions. Anyone who has done the Walk Through the Bible seminar knows the power of hand motions. This can really help with the subtle words in a verse. For example if it said, “then Jesus went down from Jerusalem”. You could use your hand to motion going down from a high hill into a lower area. This kinesthetic movement will help memory.

There were some other words of advice and I have a bunch of stuff on names from my leader training stuff, but I think this is enough for right now.