YL Capernaum Everywhere

It is that time of year! We have turned the corner and excitement is building for the ultimate summer road trip to Young Life camp! With all the behind the scenes work YOU do to bring kids with you to camp we are thrilled to maximize that experience with training made simple for your leaders. "Appreciating and Celebrating ALL Kids at Camp" on YL Access is a great one module add on for your summer camp leader training. This module is preparation for how to include a variety of kids in your camp week and unleash the potential of a vision for the kingdom. Feel free to customize to your leader training! Summer Camp....here we come! Better together!

We featured this blog in Dec 2015, but wanted to feature it again.  With our camping season just around the corner, these would be great suggestions for your cabin time. By Laurel Owens Everyone’s voice deserves to be heard, and everyone deserves the chance to answer. But what about our friends who can’t answer “out loud”? Laurel and Her Brother So often we find ourselves in a cabin time or Campaigner group, and our “talkative” friends control the conversation. To include our non-verbal friends we need to be “creative” in finding ways to give them equal chances to participate. Not everyone answers questions the same way, so here are some ways to answer a question without speaking: Draw or paint your answer “Imagine” the answer by picturing an image in your mind Act out the answer Sculpt your answer out of play-dough Use magnetic ABC letters and spell the answer Sign the answer (This is a fun way to teach sign language to all the students) Sing your answer (Many

Last August, I had the honor of speaking to our Beyond Capernaum friends at Young Life’s Oakbridge Camp just outside of San Diego. Jessica Thompson, who is a staff associate in San Jose, is a greatly gifted artist. We teamed up for 4 talks about being a part of a tree. Talk one was about being good soil so that the Word can be planted in our hearts and begin to grow. Talk two was about how Jesus Christ can be planted in our hearts as a tree. Talk three was about all of us being His branches. Talk four was about bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit and that together we are His orchard. As I spoke, Jessica masterfully painted that section of the club talk on a canvas. Our friends engaged in these talks in a profound way! With me, with Jessica, with the painting and with the spoken word. Using the trees around camp, we encouraged areas to have cabin times around the base of a tree. The response was powerful to learning with such strong visuals! During the last talk the painting was com

One of the things that I love the most about all of us in Capernaum is our amazing creativity in the ways we reach and connect our friends with the Good News. Sometimes the best ideas just bubble up to the surface when you least expect it. I feel so blessed to be an imagination associate of the Holy Spirit with you. Last spring one of our staff held a day camp and asked me to speak. On the last day that I spoke, I was in John 21, which is one of my two favorite stories in the New Testament. God, in His spontaneous craziness, gave me an idea just as I was about to begin. Rather than talk to my friends, why not live the story with them? It was a large group of about 70 people. I prayed that God would calm distractions, and I asked them to close their eyes and come with me to meet Jesus. I then described every sensory detail of the story. Such as… it’s early morning out on the sea. It’s cool but the sun is starting to come up. We are on a boat fishing all night long with a group of fri

God is at work in Tucson helping our friends with disabilities be welcomed, celebrated and needed! After months of meeting with pastors and churches throughout Tucson in order to share the vision of our friends transitioning from YL Capernaum into the life of the church, God brought us to a church and a pastor with a passion for that same vision. As a result of this vision, this spring volunteers from the church have started attending our Beyond Capernaum to form relationships with our friends and have committed to start a mid week connection ministry for our friends graduating out of Capernaum in fall, 2016. Their vision is to embrace and disciple our friends, live life alongside them, and encourage them to use their gifts in serving in the church and community. Many months of collaboration with this church brought us to this past Sunday when the church had a service celebrating and highlighting that each of us, no matter our (dis)ability has been invited to the table of the K

In a digital season of “open letters”, may your heart be encouraged and refreshed by one letter that has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the beauty of ministry! These words are a great reminder to the bigger whole of why we do what we do in Capernaum! May we, as leaders, always be in the group of people who fall into the category “As long as I’m around, I know that I’ll always have tons of help and support on this journey.” Dear Cerebral Palsy, You entered mine and my family's life 14 years ago and most things haven't been the same since. The adversity you bring is persuasive, but, every day I remind myself to see you as an opportunity to learn and grow. You're a source of challenge and struggle, but because of you I'm learning how to be fulfilled by small victories. You've forced me to endure scary and difficult situations, but because of you I've learned to stand in a space where there's seemingly no solution and solve the problem

I am not a farmer. I actually live right downtown in Nashville. I live in the city and have a tiny yard, and I am not an expert in growing anything. However, I do plant quite a few flower seeds and bulbs in our little garden, and I enjoy seeing the flowers grow. I love to watch as the daffodils come up in the spring, and my husband and I notice each tulip as it opens, and we marvel at the number of different colors that grow from similar looking bulbs. When I’m planting, if I accidentally dump my seeds out of their packages, I cannot tell the difference between a seed that is going to grow into a red flower or a seed that is going to grow into purple flower. I cannot look at a bulb and tell you if it will grow into a daffodil or a tulip. However, I know that God created each seed and each bulb with a specific purpose in mind. When I look at the seeds or the bulbs, unless I read the instructions on the package, I’m not sure when the flowers will bud; will it be May or not until July? B

Our friends in Capernaum are relational by creation. God has knit them together with a longing to know and to be known, no different than everyone else that surrounds them. How to navigate these longings can be tricky, just as it can be for traditional high school kids, but seems to take a good bit of navigation with our friends so as to not experience heart ache every time they develop a friendship at club or camp. As leaders, we can continually offer our friends a healthy understanding of relationships. Whether it’s thru simple gestures like reminding them of side hugs and high five’s, or verbal reminders that someone may or may not actually be their girl/boyfriend. We can also dig deeply with them by looking at the person who best modeled for us what relationships can really look like. Consider this series on relationships, exploring friendships, family relationships, peer relationships, dating relationships and marriage, with your friends. You could use this in club talks or