What does it mean to be a
Young Life Leader ???
“We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the Gospel of God but our very lives as well because you had become so dear to us.”
I Thessalonians 2:8
“Even though I am free of the demands and expectations of everyone, I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people; religious, non-religious, meticulous moralists, loose living immoralists, the defeated, the demoralized…however, I didn’t take on their way of life, I kept my bearings in Christ… but I entered their world and tried to experience things from their point of view. I’ve become just about every sort of servant there is in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life. I did all of this because of the Message. I didn’t just want to talk about it; I wanted to be in on it!”
I Corinthians 9:19-27 (The Message)
“On hearing this, Jesus said, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick, for I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Matthew 9:12, 13b
What does it mean to be a Young Life Leader?
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind…”
Being a Young Life Leader means having a growing personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Luke 10:27
Being a Young Life Leader means loving high school folks through personal relationships in order to share the message of Jesus Christ.
Q: How does this happen?
A: We enter their world. We build relationships with them on their turf.
Q: What is the commitment?
A: How long does it take to build a relationship?
Showing up at the school – on an average twice a week
Being a part of running weekly Young Life Club
Leading interested kids in a Campaigner Bible Study
What it is…What it isn’t…
Relational – an adult friendBeing a chaperone
Relational – ongoing A weekly event
OutreachYouth group
Walking with kids through the questionsSimply giving the answers
A calling to invest in kids’ livesOne more place to volunteer
A place to love and be loved
Life-changing…eternity changing
Becoming a Young Life Leader is a commitment. It will demand a commitment of your time and your heart. On average, it will involve ten to fifteen hours each week to invest, value, and care for high school folks.
Young Life is…
Adults reaching kids for Christ through personal relationships with them, using the model of Jesus Christ to love them unconditionally and to meet them on their own turf!
Our vision was born with a young church youth leader in Gainesville, Texas, in 1938, who was given the challenge by a farsighted senior minister, to take the local high school as his parish and pioneer a path to connect with non-churched kids.
That young man, Jim Rayburn, started a weekly club for about ten kids, seemingly disinterested in God and the church. He believed that every kid had the right to hear the message of Jesus Christ and decide how to respond to the Gospel. Singing, a skit or two, and a talk about Jesus Christ – that’s how the dream began!
Through the years, Rayburn and the staff of Young Life developed a relational style of outreach. Convinced they had to earn the right to be heard, they sought to befriend teens. Today, the mission is still committed to incarnational witness – embodying and expressing the love of Christ in relationships with people.
Volunteer leadership emerged in the late 1940’s. Thousands of leaders, like yourself, work directly with adolescents as they spend quality time with kids where they live, study, work and play. Leaders hold weekly meetings that are full of singing, games, skits and short talks about Jesus.
In the past sixty years, Young Life has broadened its reach to inner city youth, developmentally disabled adolescents, junior high kids, teenage mothers, and young people in over fifty-three countries.
Jim Rayburn believed in reflecting the worth of young people by treating them with respect. Part of that was to give kids the best week of their lives through Young Life’s camping program. Today there are twenty-four Young Life properties filled with high school folks all year round.
Young people who want to grow in their walk of faith are encouraged to be involved in a Young Life Campaigner discipleship group where they participate in Bible study, prayer, and sharing.
Young Life’s purpose today is STILL to touch youth across the globe with the message of Jesus Christ.
YOUNG LIFE’s Mission statement
OUR VISION
Every adolescent will have the opportunity to meet Jesus Christ and follow Him.
OUR MISSION
Introducing adolescents to Jesus Christ and helping them grow in their faith.
We accomplish our mission by…
Praying for young people
Going where kids are
Building personal relationships with them
Winning the right to be heard
Providing experiences that are fun, adventurous, and life changing
Sharing our lives and the Good News of Jesus Christ with adolescents
Inviting them to personally respond to this Good News
Loving them regardless of their response
Nurturing kids so they might grow in their love for Christ and the knowledge of God’s Word and become people who can share their faith with others
Helping young people develop the skills, assets and attitudes to reach their full God-given potential
Encouraging kids to live connected to the Body of Christ by being an active member of a local congregation
Working with a team of like-minded individuals – volunteer leaders, committee members, donors and staff
What Being in the Young Life Ministry
Ought to do for You
It ought to be so unreachably big that you can only see it through the eyes of Christ by faith.
It ought to be harder than you can handle on your own so as to make you more dependent on God.
It ought to give you enough disappointments to make you humble and break your spiritual pride.
It ought to be difficult enough to make you weep for others that you might become more compassionate.
It ought to have enough demanding, insensitive, ungrateful people in it to teach you to love like Jesus loves.
It ought to have enough impossible, insurmountable obstacles in it to teach you the goodness and power of God.
It ought to teach you how to love when you’re tired, give when you’re spent and pray when you’re weary.
It ought to teach you how to turn your mourning into dancing, your sadness into joy and your sorrow into laughter.
It ought to teach you the power and Truth of God’s Word, the strength of His Voice and the might of His commands.
It ought to teach you to love the only One worthy of all our love; the One who became poor that we might become rich, the One who became sin that we might become the righteousness of God.
A true ministry is the ministry that helps you become:
more like Jesus, more in love with God, more in love with people.
My Commitment
By Bill Goans
As long as high school kids mill around at ball games looking for love in all the wrong places,
As long as they desperately seek an identity based on the opinions of friends and reputation,
As long as kids limp through the stands broken by family strife, enslaved by drugs, alcohol, and sex,
I want to be found – not in the adult section where it is respectable and controlled,
but right in the middle where passions, vulgar and profane, blurt out obscenity,
Where raucous and reckless facades hide wounded hearts filled with torment and fear,
Where the price tags have been changed and the darkness confuses –
Right in the middle where God has positioned me to shine forth His grace, His hope, His love and His Truth.
As long as there is an enemy who can convince his victims that tomorrow doesn’t matter, that harm will not find them, that chains are like jewelry, and cool is free,
As long as his lies leave character, soul, and life in ruins – when thrill goes ill and fun turns fatal,
As long as terminal is only a passage word to an eternity of one’s own choosing.
As long as God has rendered him a defeated foe using the weakest of us to shine a light that pierces the darkest places, that brings rescue to the lost,
As long as the darkness is blasted away by the Light of the world – the Light that lives within all who know, follow, and love Him.
As long as there is such darkness, I’ll man my post right in the middle of all that chaos, holding my position until He calls another play, and I steal home.
As long as we stand in such an important place, we must not forget what it means to be salt and light in this tasteless and dark generation.
In Jesus,
Bill
Jim Rayburn’s Prayercirca 1946
Dear Lord,
Give us the teenagers that we may lead them to Thee. Our hearts ache for the nine million young people who remain untouched by the Gospel and for the tragically large proportion of those who have dropped by the wayside and find themselves without spiritual guidance. Help us to give them a chance, oh Father – a chance to become aware of Thy Son’s beauty and healing power in the might of the Holy Spirit. Oh Lord Jesus, give us the teenagers, each one at least long enough for a meaningful confrontation with Thee. We are at best unprofitable servants, but Thy grace is sufficient. Oh Thou Holy Spirit, give us the teenagers. For we love them and know them to be awfully lonely. Dear Lord, give us the teenagers.