Written by It’s the end of your trip. You’re preparing your group to head home. You and your team are saying your goodbyes to camp staff, missionaries, and new friends. You’re taking group pictures, thinking about the ride or flight home. And when you finally get back, you can’t wait for those first few minutes of silence and stillness before heading home to see your family, take a nice long shower, and sleep in your own bed.
Sound familiar? I know I tend to feel all of those things during the end of our trips. But what about intentional follow-up with your students?
Students usually encounter Jesus in new and refreshing ways during trips and come away with a renewed desire to follow Him and grow deeper in their faith. The question we need to ask ourselves is this: are we intentionally leveraging and engaging in these moments to best steward and grow our students’ relationship with Jesus?
In my early years of student ministry I didn’t always focus on this. And it became painfully obvious that my students rode the “camp high” and then began to fizzle out as they simply went back to their old habits. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
We can avoid the “camp high” by helping our students to intentionally continue engaging in their relationship with Jesus and continuing in community with believers. We can help them see that there is more than simply settling for the mundane and typical life this world offers, and instead show them how amazing and grand it can be with Jesus.
One of the ways we can do this is by offering intentional steps our students can take to engage their faith and help them with follow up. Here’s what it looks like for us.
We sit our group down all together for ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the trip before we load up to go home and we take time to talk through intentional steps they can take.
We talk about continuing to be in biblical community, engaging with spiritual rhythms, next steps in their faith journey like baptism, joining a summer mission trip, serving in the church and their community, and sharing their story with others. Each of these steps are designed to eliminate the myth of the “camp high” and to help students continue to grow and flourish in their faith.
We also tried a new approach this year where we gave postcards to our small group leaders that were designed to give students a means of responding to their experience on the retreat. We realize that as our ministry has grown, the large group gatherings at the end are great, but with a discipleship format, having small group leaders engage in a different setting allows us to help our students grow and take steps of faith. The postcards can be fairly simple and should included space for contact information, and then some tangible check boxes. The check boxes could include things like, I followed Jesus, I want to get baptized, I want to serve, and I have questions.
We also try to be intentional in providing pathways for students to take after the trip that will help them grow in their faith. After our winter retreat we launch our summer trip sign-ups a week after returning home. We challenge students to serve by promoting opportunities during youth group in the weeks following our trips. We also try to provide thoughtful and intentional ways for students to share their stories throughout the year.
Providing intentional opportunities for follow-up with your students allows for continued growth and development of their faith. It also helps students to understand that their faith doesn’t simply ride the rollercoaster of jumping from event to event but is an ongoing journey they get to be a part of with Jesus. It also helps to ensure that upcoming generations don’t walk away from their faith after high school, but instead are committed to an ongoing transformative relationship with their Savior.
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