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Semester Club Talk Plan for the Gospel of John

A few weeks ago I mentioned that our YL region is focusing on the book of John for the entire year. Club, campaigners, leader meetings, region meetings, devotionals, as much as possible. I have written before how much I like going through the gospels in club for talks and campaigners. I know at least one club that is now going through the seven “I am” statements in John for club this semester.

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Categories: Club Talks
Tags: Club Talk, gospel of john, John, Semester, talk, Talk Helps, talk planning
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Christmas Talk

I was having an email conversation with my friend Stacy from Santa Barbara about club talks around Christmas.

What do you do around Christmas? Do you just do standard club talks, do you change it up?

I’ve done a few things, here are a couple ideas:

For an incarnation theme, you could talk about how we all talk about Santa coming down from somewhere up north and literally into our homes. Obviously this sounds a lot like the incarnation! In this theme you could read the words to "Santa Clause is coming to town", they are a bit creepy actually! You can compare how God is quite different.

We have done a gift exchange at the end of club and the biggest present is part of the club talk. Inside a large gift wrapped box is simply the Bible and you read about God’s greatest gift to us in His Son.

You could talk about God’s free gift of new life… "do you want to accept the gift"?

I always re-ask my children during this time of year, "who’s birthday is it"? They all know it is Jesus’. Then I ask them, "who then should be getting the gifts?" They always respond with Jesus. Then we talk about how we can live for God and serve Him and others during this part of the year.

You can have leaders and/or students read the Christmas story in Luke. Here is what we did in my WL club last week:

Read Luke 2:1-20

Readers:

Luke 2:1-12 Juan

Luke 2:13-15 Julia

Luke 2:16-20 Vince

Another thing we have done is have an open sharing time for students. I might ask a campaigner kid to be ready to share to get it started. Sometimes you will be amazed what kids have to say. It could end up being a great gift to the leaders.

What have you done around Christmas time for the talk?

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Categories: Club Talks
Tags: Christmas, talk planning, Talks
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How Important is the “Is There a God” Club Talk These Days?

The other night I was having a conversation with a veteran YL leader from my area. He has been in YL over twenty years. We were talking about the club talk progression early in the semester. The club he leads decided to start right off with “person of Christ” talks. What he and I remember through the years as part of the standard progression is a talk early in the semester about “Is there a God”, or “There must be a God”. It seems that many clubs I know have done this talk less and less, including my club.

My rational is that statistics show that Americans basically all agree that there is a God. Previously I had seen reports of only about 5% of Americans not believing in God. But recent Barna research shows that only 9% of Americans would consider themselves atheist or agnostic. In another report, they show that this number may be higher for younger people, closer to 19%.

What is much more important to us is knowing our kids. We don’t need to base our club on national averages. We need to know our club kids and where they stand with God. This is a key YL relational principle that needs to be taken into consideration more than a national survey. One club might need to do three “Is there a God” club talks, while another club might be able to skip it.

What are your thoughts?

BTW I’m doing a “Is There a God” talk tonight in my club