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.
To counter this challenge I have tried a few things. One thing I have tried, and also seen others do, is to simply pick the scripture and put it in our semester club plan for all to see ahead of time, this way everyone knows exactly what to expect. What we did this year is go through one chapter of the book of Mark each week. So I told our leaders, pick any story that you want out of the chapter we are going through that week. I have worked through the book of Mark a bunch of times and, with the exception of a few chapters in the middle, it is laid out nearly perfect for a traditional semester YL talk sequence. This approach gave the leaders a few stories to pick from in a chapter. It narrowed down the options quickly but allowed them to have the topic be “their own”.
What have you done for topics relating to “person of Christ” talks?
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3 thoughts on “This Year…Limit the Choices for the Person of Christ Talks”
I find too that “person of Christ” talks are very broad and hard for leaders to nail down the story they want to talk on each week. I love your idea of narrowing the field. Do you have talk schedules thru Mark that you can share with us?
Ryan, thanks! Here are some ideas…
Week Type What we learn about Christ Mark Description
1 Incarnation Incarnation 1:9-11 Baptism of Jesus
2 Person of Christ Power over Sickness 2:1-12 Paralytic on mat
3 Person of Christ Power to do Good 3:1-6 Man with shriveled hand
4 Person of Christ Power over Nature 4:35-41 Calms the storm
5 Person of Christ Power to heal Private Issues 5:24-34 Bleeding woman
6 Person of Christ Power to Provide 6:30-44 Feeds 5000
7 Person of Christ Power to Heal 7:31-37 Heals deaf/mute
8 Person of Christ Jesus doesn’t force belief 8:27-30 Peter’s confession of Christ
9 Person of Christ Power over Evil 9:17-32 Boy with an evil spirit
10 Sin Perfection is Impossible for Man 10:17-27 Rich young ruler
11 Sin 11:12-18 Jesus clears temple
12 ? Need help here
13 ? Need help here
14 Cross Sacrifice for our sin Various
15 Cross Sacrifice for our sin Various
16 Resurrection Power over death! 16:1:14
THANKS GUYS! I’m giving the first POC talk this week at Wyldlife and have been struggling with what scripture to use to introduce our middle school friends who Jesus is and show them why they would want to follow him. The verses PHSYL gave are a great starting point.