Gospel of Luke: Clubs Synchronize Talks This Year

Two things come up over and over on this blog… I like going through the gospels for club talks (and campaigners… see here and here and here) and I like collaboration. It was only a matter of time before I combined the two.

This year in our area all of our clubs are going through the Gospel of Luke. I have identified a specific passage in each chapter for us to teach (see the document below). I then created a Google Doc (see example here) with the list of talks and our team leaders assigned talks for the semester (we will do the same for the Spring when we get closer). For Wyldlife we had them just pick one of the chapters that is closest to their dates since they meet less often.

After the talks were assigned, we had an all area club talk training seminar, similar to what we have done in years past, but we had breakout groups, four chapters of Luke at a time (then we switched), with a person who had prepared to lead each group, and everyone in our area who is doing that talk, and they went through the passage and discussed ideas about how to do a club talk on that passage. If that was confusing, think of it this way… If you were assigned the calling of Levi the tax collector (5:27-32), you met up with a veteran leader and all the other leaders in the area who will also be doing this talk. During this time you worked through the passage, brainstormed ideas, shared your own, etc. We did this for all of the odd chapters of Luke (we do the odd in the Fall and the even in the Spring). This also created a community of people who will be praying for each and continuing to share ideas as their talks approach.

I was part of the Lk. 3:21-22 team and we had some good emails the week before the talk and then also compared notes afterward. In fact, I helped out by playing guitar in our WL club while Mary did her talk on Lk. 3:21-22 and as it turned out we both had the same idea about how to communicate one of the details… and I stole some of her ideas (stealing talk ideas is totally a great idea by the way… steal the ideas but don’t try to “be” anyone else but yourself, the Lord only needs you not anyone else).

Here are some benefits and challenges of doing something like this:

Benefits:

· It will simplify the question, “what should I talk about?”

· It will give leaders and students an easy springboard into campaigners and personal Bible reading.

· Since several leaders will all be giving the same talk each week they can connect to prep, encourage, pray, share ideas, etc.

· It allows Luke to set the progression of the “gospel” we proclaim in club

Challenges:

· We realize WL meets less often so they will not cover all of the talks, pick the ones closest to club.

· Since we are using one story from each chapter, we will end up speaking on stories which may have never been done in club. I think this will stretch us in a good way to think about our gospel, but it may require extra planning and might be a better fit for a leader with several years experience.

· The club talk progression will look a little different. It is OK if we talk about responding to Jesus before the sin talk, or before the cross talk… why? Because Jesus didn’t wait for that either. The founder of YL was well known for saying we must give kids a chance to respond to Jesus in every club talk we do.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions about this. I am also toying with the idea of doing a Google Hangout, or something similar, for a half hour window on Sunday nights for my leaders, or anyone really, who wants to go through their club talk plans. I think we could all really benefit from further collaboration and challenging ourselves to see what the Gospel of Luke brings up in our club talks.

Here is a document with more details if you are interested.

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PS… If you are looking for campaigner resources see this post and maybe this too.

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