Ted - I want to take some time to talk to you about some of the dynamics, the  behind the scenes, things that take place within the summer day camp  experience. I want to show this clip to you again. You've already seen it, but I  want to show it to you again about Johnell and the experience that he had with  his emerging leaders. And then I want to come back and talk a little bit about  some of the things that were happening behind within the summer camp  experience that I think will be very beneficial for you as students.  

Johnell - transformation in the heart of the city where youth grow in faith and  confidence to serve, starting with the children in our neighborhood, reaching as  far as God's purpose for their lives take them. Switch up exists to mold youth in  northeast Denver into transformational leaders of their generation. Our vision is  seeing a community of young, transformational leaders who are impacting their  friends, family and community. 

Hannah - Johnell and I have been working with Ted Travis to create switch up  from Ted's transformational discipleship model, 

Johnell - transformational discipleship developed by Ted Travis cultivated about  four emerging leaders that were impacting about 25 kids in the neighborhood.  We have actually taken the model and expanded it in partnership with the  Denver Red Shield, where we have seven emerging leaders who are impacting  up to 60 kids per day in a five week summer day camp.  

Jessica - So taking on a leadership role and meeting possibly 20 kids at a time,  pretty much on your own. It's a pretty intense experience. 

Kiara - like when they first introduced it to us, they're like, Well, you go, you're  gonna run, lead kids and, like, inspire them. So I just thought leadership was  more about being dominate, speaking over everyone. 

Johnell - So we have this word called adultism in transformational discipleship,  and it's a danger that takes place inside the context of youth leadership. And it's  a part where inside of the summer game camp in which our emerging leaders  are leading, if things begin to go chaotic, then adults have the tendency to take  over. However, as youth become more comfortable in their leadership, they  begin to push back on the leadership and simply say, we got 

Champ - and when we started realizing, like, wow, these are kids, you know,  these are lives that are growing and we're working with and we have a chance  to pour into them so much,

A. D. - that was like the challenge for me. 

Alysha - If you see a bunch of kids smiling, having fun and like they're looking up to me like, I want to be like her someday. 

Jessica - This actually made me feel really. Made me feel like, capable of doing more than I have stopped. 

Janesha - I didn't know that. Like teenagers like this, 

Hannah - they've definitely shown up this become a safe place for them to  grow. I'm different here than I am other places. I'm more outgoing here, I believe in myself more here, and so I'm glad that we could create that foundation. 

Isaiah - Slow drove has actually made a really big impact on my life.  

Lee - There's always been a teacher or my parents always tell me, like, you're a leader. I switched my whole like leadership role and made me step out my  comfort zone. 

Several speakers - And I think there's a lot of different types of leadership, and  everybody has their own strengths. Whatever type of leader you are, like, you're  gonna you can make it from here, like you can inspire too. It's really helped me  out to be a better person. I accepted this opportunity. It was like, I'm gonna be a  leader, because everybody said I was. 

Johnell - Thank you for the Salvation Army Democrats shield for allowing our  emerging leaders to design and lead their summer day camp. Thank you to all of our supporters who have journeyed alongside of us for the last seven months as we begin to develop the transformational establishment model. And we would  like to invite more people to support. 

Ted - I want to point out to you some aspects of the summer day camp that I  think were very significant, both to Janelle as the leader and to the emerging  leaders as well. One window is a month before the camp was the start. Johnell  called me. And he called me into his office, and he said, you know, Ted, I got a  problem. And I said, What's the problem? He said, I don't know what to do. And I said, What do you mean? You don't know what to do. He said. I said, there's  nothing for me to do. I mean, the emerging leaders, they're ready, they're  preparing the camp. Everything is working, and I don't know what to do. And so I laughed and said, well. You know, go home, relax, take a vacation. You, you,  you put in the you put in the work, you prepared and so now it's time to relax. It's

time to relax and be ready for the first day of camp. But it's interesting, you  know, I think one of the great enemies of youth ministry is the sense of  immediacy and urgency that is so prevalent within particularly the Western  culture, Western Christian culture, you we don't realize that time really is our  friend. I remember meeting with some some leaders, church leaders, and I had  been involved with their youth program, and they asked me what I thought, and I said, you don't give yourselves enough time for youth development. Your youth  could lead very easily the programs that you're running, but they can't do it when you start preparing for it a week before the event, you need to give yourself  time. It's almost as if someone has talked about this. I'm not sure who it was, but I read this somewhere that there's the law of the farm and the law of the city,  and the idea is that most of us live the law of the law of the of the city, where  everything is immediate, everything's fast paced, and you want immediate  results all the time, whereas the law of the farm is very different. Again, I did not  grow up on a farm, so I don't know this, but I I do know enough about what  happens when you plant and you water and things grow. And farmers know  about this. They understand how that works. Where there's a time to plant the  seeds, there's a time to water and to nurture and there's a time when, when it  finally comes to fruition. And we need that law of the farm in youth development.  You need to recognize that that God, if you do the right things and you introduce the right things at the right time, it's going to lead to growth, it's going to lead to  development. And we need that in youth ministry, and so we need to think in  terms of a think about ministry over a year's time, instead of just a day or a  month when we plan. I know that for me, I would plan for the for the ministry  year. I do that in August. The ministry year started September through August of  the next year. I would start in August. I would take the time to do the planning,  after meeting with youth and figuring out what their felt needs were, their  expression of their felt needs, then I would, I would put, I would put the sessions together, at least a general sense of where we're going for the year. I'd start off  with relational type top topics in the first part of the year, and then move into  more of the God doctrinal topics. Toward the end of the year, you can focus on  before you early in the year, you focus on things like family and school and  struggles with peers, whereas toward the end, you can talk about God and  Christ and salvation and those things. But you, you think over a long period of  time, you start your your your work with your emerging leaders. You get them  started working with kids in a small children in a small group. For you start them  off in maybe October, November, where they're starting to meet with kids, and  they're learning how to work as a team in leading a small group of young people. And that prepare prepares the way for them, when during the summer, they'll be  doing that for five days a week for X number of weeks, you don't start preparing  your summer program a week before it starts. You start working on your summer program four or five months in advance, you give youth time to train, to prepare, 

to plan, to work through their questions and become comfortable with with  leading. We need to have a healthy view of time. I know that there are different  cultures respond to time differently, but I think it really is a stewardship and how  we work with people over time, and how we allow for the Word of God and for  the Spirit of God to move in such a way that young people grow, they change.  And so that's one window a second window into some of the dynamics of day  camp. It took place the first week of camp. Johnell heard that there that the  emerging leaders are having some problems, and so we pulled them together  and said, What's up? And they replied, says, Look, you have trained us, you  prepared us, and yet now you're kind of getting in the way. Let us do this. We  can get this done. Let us do our work. And Johnell was surprised by that, but he  said, but then he thought about He says, Yeah, you're right. He says, so. So, in  a sense, he backed off. But what he did was he discovered that he still had a  little bit of adultism in him, that he was behaving as if he knew what to do, and  they did not know what to do, and he was trying to exert little measures of  control That was unnecessary. I've been a music student, a sing, a singing vocal student, for a long time. And one of the things you have to deal with as you're  studying voice, there's this thing called muscle memory. When you are born,  your body works perfectly, but over time, you start developing different habits  that impact your your singing voice. Maybe you decide it sounds better to talk  like this, or maybe there's something else that you do with your posture, or  something that messes with your voice. Well, a vocal coach will come in and  they help you deal with that muscle memory. We youth leaders have muscle  memory as well. We have practices that we do that we don't want to do, and we  don't even see ourselves doing them, but it happens. Want you to know that that free for youth leadership, especially in the area of transformational discipleship,  it's okay to allow someone to help you, someone outside of you, to see what  you're doing and coach you help us. If you realize you're doing this right now, or  you're saying this right now? And let me help you. Get us get a get a start on  doing it the right way. And then, as you learn those things, you will continue to  sing properly or lead properly. You need to know that in the realm of music that  opera singers, famous opera singers, singers that have sung for 30-40, years,  they have coaches. They have coaches. Those coaches help them. In the realm of youth ministry, particularly if we're going to to change to a transformative  approach. It's helpful to have someone there helping you, just checking in,  helping you see helping you learn how to be more transformational in your  ministry. If that's your case, please be aware. Hopefully this course will help you, but also our ministry will be around to help you with that. There's opportunities  for being being coached and being being helped in learning how to do that  better. The third window is when a leader, another leader, came to visit the  summer day camp. And this was a lesson in, I think of Walt Whitman's phrase,  I'm the teacher of athletes. He that, by me, spreads a wider breast than my own,

proves the width of my own. Well, this guy who was a leader. Another Christian  organ youth organization had visited, and Johnell was going to walk with Him  through the summer day camp. They were they met at a community center, so  he was going to take him through. And he did that, and I just happened to be  there with him, so I'm walking with them, the three of us, and Johnell is  explaining everything. He's talking about the program and how it works. He's  talking about the emerging leaders and their responsibility. He's talking about  why they do what they do, and the impact that it's having on young people. And  he's talking all of these things about transformational discipleship, and all the  stuff that comes out of building cathedrals and all the stuff that we worked on  over the past year. Well, I didn't say a thing. I didn't have to, and I really didn't  want to. It wasn't my moment. It was his moment, and he was doing all of this  explaining, and I just felt just a sense of excitement that he owns this, he  understands, and he is excited about bringing about change, genuine change, in the young people that he's serving. You know, in leadership, many times I was  the same way youth leaders are trained to are trained to lead, who are not  necessarily trained to develop leaders. But part of developing leaders is that  when you develop the leaders. You let them lead, and then you rejoice in what  they have learned. It's passing it on and being there as a coach and as a  supportive person. But it's not about you, it's about the people that God  influences through you. You're just the conduit and this transformational ministry. It creates that. It creates that kind of experience where now you really are  seeing things passed on. You're seeing youth passing on what they know to  children, and then you see adults passing what they know on to youth. And so  you have a multiplying effect. You have that in a neighborhood, life becomes  very dynamic and very exciting. I just wanted to share with you those three  windows into the Emerging Leader and the day camp experience. There are  things that happen that really are transformative and are life changing.



கடைசியாக மாற்றப்பட்டது: புதன், 15 ஏப்ரல் 2026, 9:45 AM