Maintaining the Camp Motivation

Last week I took 3 of my students to Super Summer Oklahoma. For those of you who are unfamiliar of the camp, Super Summer is a leadership based camp where churches nominate youth who have shown leadership in their church, school, youth group, etc. The idea is to place students with other students around the state who are being leaders where they are and walking this journey of following Jesus. Students are challenged in several aspects to grow deeper in their relationship with Jesus as well as living out a life that shows his love to the world. Overall, I would definitely recommend Super Summer to youth ministries as a way to challenge and push their youth leaders. I took a freshman, a sophomore, and a 2009 HS Graduate, all girls.

The constant struggle for youth ministers and other youth ministry volunteers is one of maintaining the excitement and enthusiasm upon retuning home and back to “normal life”. I remember attending camp, Super Summer, retreats, D-Nows, and many other events where I would be challenged and pushed with excitement to go and do, but as I returned home I would gradually lose the enthusiasm and excitement. I didn’t necessarily fall into a struggling life, but my push to “do” was gone. My enthusiasm was gone. My excitement for following Jesus was minimal. As a HS student, college student working with youth, and now a youth minister, I’ve searched and searched for a remedy to this gradual slide into complacency. The very idea of retreats and D-Nows was formed out of this issue of summertime “camp high”, but even those haven’t remedied the issue.

So what can we do as youth ministers and youth ministry volunteers to help keep the excitement and enthusiasm to follow Jesus through out the year and years to come? Here are some of my suggestions coming from my experience as a teenager as well as working with teenagers.

• Invest in the everyday lives of your volunteers (this one is mostly for youth ministers). If the very people who are leading your youth ministry are becoming complacent, then it is only a matter of time before your youth will. Challenge your adults to grow deeper. Send challenging emails and facebook messages. Recommend books and articles for them to read. Give them specific challenges to invest in specific students.
• Invest in the everyday lives of your youth leaders, probably the students you took to SS (for youth ministers and volunteers). Challenge them to go deeper. Ask the tough questions. Set up a regular time to meet with them. Give them specific people to latch on to (adults and youth). Find responsibilities for them to take on with in the church. Don’t be afraid of being blunt or straight forward with them. If you’re a volunteer, seek out one or two students who you can mentor, and don’t take that job lightly.
• Set up reminders of camp and Super Summer and refer to them often. We made a mosaic cross at camp this year. It is in my office currently, but I’m going to hang it in our youth cafe and bring it up throughout the year as an example of Christian community. The people in the OT were constantly setting up reminders of God so that they would always remember the event and God’s faithfulness.
• Discern excitement from emotional feel good experience. Promote excitement in teaching, bible study, missions, etc. Don’t let emotion be the only catalyst for transformation.
• Don’t let yourself become complacent. Do everything you can to maintain your own excitement. Keep growing deeper. Make sure to personally maintain you own relationship with God. You can’t lead teenagers to become followers of Jesus if you are being one.

These are just a few things that I would suggest. You may have others to add. Feel free to comment and share your ideas with me and others. Remember, following Jesus is a daily laying down of one’s life for Christ and is not summed up in a week long experience or single life event. The purpose for these onetime/annual events and camps is to challenge and push us to continue on in our journey. I hope that our teenagers and we ourselves would not fall into the trap of event based Jesus following.