Virtually every YL leader can answer this question, “When is club?” Virtually every YL leader can answer this question, “When is campaigners?” Virtually every YL leader can answer this question, “When is camp?” But if you were to ask virtually any YL leader the following question, you would likely hear a long pause, “When is contact work?”
Not only are there spiritual obstacles to contact work, there are timing issues as well. In fact, this is a primary reason leaders, including me too, struggle with contact work. Now, the easy fix is simply to schedule it! For those of you that have your contact work scheduled, say donuts on Monday mornings, or helping in the lunch line every other Thursday, or coaching the cross country team in the Fall, then you are set. But, for the vast majority of teams and leaders, they do not have this in place. It might be that their job or school schedule doesn’t allow for it. It might be that the school won’t let you go on campus.
Here are a couple of ideas to overcome this obstacle:
1. Pick a day and time, whether or not anyone is at the school, and just go there to pray.
2. Find a partner to join you, contact work is much easier if you do it in pairs, and it adds accountability.
3. Commit to going to every home game of a certain level (Frosh/JV/Varsity). Many schools use Google calendars and you can import those automatically into most smart phones.
4. In club make one of the game prizes something you deliver to the school (food, snack, t-shirt, etc.) Kids will be counting on you.
5. If you have a recurring event in your life, say you go to the grocery store every Sunday afternoon, invite a student to go with you each week.
6. Set a reminder on your phone/calendar for you to contact a student via text/fb/twitter.
Those are just a couple ideas to help overcome the timing barrier to contact work.
How do you ensure consistent contact work?
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