Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

My friend Doug from YL Vancouver Island has contributed to YLHelp in the past and has sent me even more great stuff to share.

Below are his club plans from last semester and the coming semester. He said that the plans are based around a G6-8 (WyldLife) club with notes on the side for the high school club.  The talks have the same content for both clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

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:

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?

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

A lot has happened since I wrote this post. There were some fantastic comments on the post that were very thought provoking for me. I also went to Woodleaf, where my friend Dave did an excellent job proclaiming the gospel. In fact, he did something very similar to what I was planning. He moved up the traditional talk sequence one day also. Honestly, I don’t think many leaders even noticed. It worked flawlessly. So that was good confirmation.

I also had been hitting a wall in the overall flow and analogy of my talks, so after a lot of through and prayer I pretty much stopped the 20+ pages of outlines and notes I had prepared and took a different approach, but I didn’t change the sequence.

I am now prepared and excited to speak in about a week. I have everything written and outlined. But I am working to fine-tune some details. In case you are interested, here is the general plan…

I have a drama, a cardboard testimony part (saw this at my church and at Woodleaf, which was awesome), and one main analogy. I am using a ring as an analogy that will carry over through several talks. I can go into that more later if anyone is interested, but I think it is a good one that is theologically sound and is easy to understand.

Also for the real life / role play type thing, I am going with the Best/Worst day thing from City Slickers (similar to this clip), I’ve done it before at summer camp and it was utilized really well by the Woodleaf team this year. I can tell you more if you are interested.

I’m not quite settled on doing a relationships/sex seminar. Does anyone have any good outlines, resources, details or comments about this? I have some, but I’d love to hear what you have to say.

If you have been following this, or enjoy ylhelp, I’d really appreciate your prayers as I begin speaking on July 11th.

Here is the fifth installment of Sync through Mark…

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on these in email and conversations. Any feedback you’d like to post in the comments? Anything that has really helped or could be added to make it more useful?

Here is the fourth installment of Sync through Mark…

Here is the second installment of Sync through Mark…

Thanks to Andi and Karen for your helpful edits too!

We are very excited to announce a wide-spanning project called “Sync”. Simply put, the first project is a weekly club talk through a story in each chapter of the book of Mark with a corresponding Campaigner plan. Here are some thoughts behind it:

• Club talk resources can really help new and experienced leaders plan club talks
• Campaigners often needs an extra boost, having a ready-to-go Bible study makes it easier
• I have found it is easy to follow-up with a campaigners based on the club talk rather then introducing a whole new topic
• A major strength of our club talks is that they are Christ-centered, lets try more of that in Campaigners
• Often times in Campaigners I find myself asking the question, “what should we cover?”. This lets the author of Mark have a say in that.
• The Gospels and the Gospel of Mark are the outline of our traditional club talk sequence, so it will flow naturally with most club talk semesters.

I have invited a bunch of the best speakers and YL people I know to help on this project. Each week will combine the ideas of some of the best people out there. Even better, we can collaborate through the comments on each post to improve them. We will be adding about one per week until we get through Mark!

Here are some of the top posts on YLHelp.com over the past months.

They tell me that leaders are looking for help with campaigners, with club, with situations with kids, and a lot with club talks.

Very soon I will be telling you about a bunch of help we will post about club talks and campaigners. It is very exciting and a lot of people are working on it.

1. TalkPrep – Message Worksheet – Woman Caught in Adultery – A worksheet that helps plan a talk on the woman caught in adultery.

2. Campaigners Chaos – Getting them to talk: Faces Handout – A fun ready-to-print handout for campaigners.

3. The BEST Talk Illustrations (3 of 5) Video clip and talk idea from Blood Diamond – I am your father who loves you.

4. Entire Semester of Club Plans Download – A full semester of club plans.

5. What NOW? – Female student won’t leave male leader alone – Just one of those things we deal with.

6. Cross Talk Help – A Harmony of the Cross Story – A helpful summary when doing a cross talk.

7. Cabin Time Continued… Campaigners Bible Study – A campaigners booklet you can order with a free chapter to download.

Any posts that you liked? Any topics you would like covered more?

My friend Twiggs years ago showed me a short foreign movie about the famous story of the drawbridge operator who closed the bridge on his son in order to save the people on the train. If you can watch it in its entirety, I recommend it. We watched it after camp with an all-area campaigners and had powerful small group discussions afterwards.

I used this earlier this year in a cross talk. I think there are lots of ways to use this clip. It is not a perfect analogy of the cross or atonement (for example, Christ’s death was voluntary by Christ, not an “accident”), but there are some very powerful themes that this clip is able to get right to.

Earlier this year we had a follow-up discussion in campaigners about this clip. Here are a few of the questions we used…

Q: What do you think those people were thinking when they crossed the bridge?

Q: How is this similar about the way people treat God?

Q: How did the father feel about his son?

Q: How do you think the father felt about the people on the train afterward?

Q: What does the movie motivate you to do in your relationship with God?