YL Capernaum Everywhere

Great ways for campaigners to be leaders on club day! 1. Pray! 2. Invite their friends to club. 3. Post pictures from club on all of their favorite social media sites. 4. Let their leaders know when events are happening at school, Special Olympics and other cool things that they are involved in so that leaders can go and they can share during Friends News 5. Wear YL gear! 6. Wait for the new friends that they invited at the door. 7. Introduce yourself to new people at club. 8. Let other people at your table get served their food first. 9. Help clean up after the meal/snack. 10. Be an “oh boy” leader and let your excitement catch on! 11. Cheer for kids who are participating in games. 12. Pray with the leader giving the talk. 13. Listen during the talk and help others do the same. 14. Tell your new friends at club how glad you are that they came. 15. Journal with words or pictures about what you learned about at club.

Great ways for your high school friends to lead at club! The Prayer Team Consider your friends who love to pray. Invite them to the pre-club meeting every week that you have club. Ask them to lead your team’s prayer time before club begins. Give them prayer requests to take home with them. The YL Club Band A lot of our friends love music. They may not be ready for the music venues of Nashville or Austin, but they are joy-filled song leaders, drummers and even piano players. Give some of your friends the chance to lead music, alongside of your club leaders. Organize time to practice and help them understand why we choose the songs that we do. Banana of the Week Sing the Banana Song at club and throw a slide up on the screen with a photo & names of the Honorary Banana of the Week! Toss them the costume and let them lead the whole club in the Banana Song! Greeters Who doesn’t love a great welcome when they get to club? Assign some friends to be greeters at the door. They c...

Work Crew and Summer Staff are such wonderful ways for our friends to grow in their faith and grow as individuals. As we pray through who the WC/SS experience would be best suited for, there are a few steps throughout the year that we have found sets them up for success.  At the end of the summer, we start talking with the friends who we are praying through serving about ways they can serve at club - come early to be part of leader meeting, to help with check in, to lead by example during club in appropriate behavior, etc.  In January we have city wide weekend camp at SharpTop Cove where we invite a few of our friends to join the Work Crew alongside other college students from Memphis. This year, we made a certificate for one of our friends to let her know she was getting to go. It was given as a Christmas gift ... and she has shown everyone with such pride and excitement!  Prior to weekend camp, we begin talking with them about specifics about serving, wha...

As we have continued to pray and dream about our camping progression and what discipleship looks like in our area, there was one local option that has become such a great win!  For the past few years, a community group at a local church has provided and served meals for club. In looking at our summer camping schedule and wanting to help our older friends transition in young adulthood well, we started looking for ways to serve our city. There is another local ministry that brings in groups from across the country to help restore, rebuild and preserve dignity to homes in some of our more forgotten communities.  Each week is adopted by a local church to serve the groups coming into Memphis to serve our city. We adopt a week along with the local church that has been serving us all year. Each day we deliver popsicles to the job sites to provide a short relief from the heat, which also allows us to get to know the home owners and others serving. In the evenings, we set up, s...

Winter Weekends are in full force and we love hearing stories about the times that you are spending with your friends on different YL weekends! It’s a full schedule, without a lot of sleep, but you guys are jumping in with your friends and giving them opportunities to hear about Jesus and be in community! Thank you! As we creatively try to think about how to best help our friends engage all of their senses in the gospel proclamation, check out this great idea that was used by an area during the fifteen minutes of silence. We made MadLibs type sheets that we had each of our friends fill out (some with a leader/buddy if they needed help). We chose the questions and gave them space to write or draw their answers. In the future, we’d make them more specific to the talks and the main points that the speaker is touching on. Having these really helped focus our cabin time discussion because when we asked questions, they had already come up with their answers and had them in front o...

As we continue to engage in ways to help our friends in Capernaum grow in their faith, we’ll be highlighting some ideas that are happening in different areas! YL Capernaum leaders are doing amazing things with their friends when it comes to discipleship! Let’s all be creative and prayerful as we consider what’s best for our friends and their needs. Sometimes we can get overwhelmed by thinking we have to dream up something big, but free yourself to remember that discipleship happens in relationships and those can be simple times together! Enjoy this great Girls Discipleship Sleepover idea… The overall hope of the time together was to continue to teach some of our girls how to be a disciple of Jesus in an age-appropriate way! We know that they are more than capable to jump in small groups, fellowship and service around their church communities so we want to help them to see their gifts more clearly, spend time with Jesus and grow in their love and understanding of Him. We gathered ...

Four college students in Austin, Texas chose the local Capernaum ministry as their focus for a film class. Together, they filmed and edited this incredible video capturing ministry in Austin. They submitted an entire SWOT analysis of the ministry and set goals for growth! What an awesome way to spend a college class and such a gift to the area! What would it look like for you to consider Capernaum in one of your classes? How can you help us grow and be better at what we do?