6 Things You Gotta Schedule in 2016

If you’ve already scheduled your 2016 mission trip, that’s great! But there are a few other things you’ll want on your calendar if you want to create a truly meaningful experience for your students. Meaningful mission trip experiences don’t just happen during the trip; they happen before and after the trip as well. So here are six things before and after the trip that you’ve got to put on your 2016 calendar.

 

 

1. Sign-Up Deadline

For many this will be a no-brainer. There are a lot of practical reasons why you need to know well in advance who’s headed on the mission trip with you. One benefit worth highlighting, though, is that having a cutoff date allows you to define who’s on the team. It lets team members build excitement with each other and start thinking, praying and sharing about the trip in a more corporate way.

 

Along with a sign-up deadline, you’ll also want to think about what kind of paperwork and payment deadlines you’ll need to give students and parents.

 

2. Team Meetings

Team meetings are important for growing your team, creating shared expectations, building excitement, and helping students prepare for what they’re about to step into. In these meetings, you can do teambuilding activities, create a team covenant, pass along logistical information, pray together and clearly communicate the meaning behind this mission trip.

 

Team meetings can look different for every group. For example, you might choose any combination of the following:

• Meet for a couple hours for lunch during the first Sunday of the month for three months before the trip.
• Get-together on a weeknight five weeks in a row to talk, pray and prepare together.
• Take a weekend retreat with your team and hold several sessions between meals, team building and small group time, putting teenagers in the same groups they will be in during the mission trip.

Whatever you schedule, think about your students’ busy lives. Even if your mission trip isn’t until late July, consider finding team time before they are out of school and some of them disappear for different parts of the summer. If possible, make attending team meetings a requirement for those who want to go on the trip.

 

If you’re going on a YW trip, you can find more ideas, resources and suggested outlines for these meetings on the backend of the YouthWorks website.

 

 

3. Send-Off

You probably know when you need to head out for your trip, but consider how you can launch students into this experience well – and how you can involve others in that sending. For example, you might…

• Have a final team meeting the day before you leave to review your team covenant or other expectations and pray as a team.
• Hold a prayer meeting for anyone from the church the day before you leave, inviting mission trip team members to share their specific prayer requests. (This is a great time to get creative with how you pray for the trip.)
• Invite parents and others to circle up and pray for the team one last time before they drive out of the church parking lot.

 

4. Sharing About the Trip

Sharing about what happened during this trip is important for students. Be proactive in scheduling a time – or a few times – when teenagers get to tell people back home about how God worked in and through them during their mission trip. This time could include showing pictures/video, sharing stories, singing songs students learned and taking time to pray for the people they met. There are lots of contexts these things could happen in, including…

• Using all or part of a church service for students to share in.
• Taking a Sunday school hour.
• Meeting at a host house for dinner or appetizers and giving students an opportunity to share upfront and also in individual conversations.
• Using a night of youth group to have students share with their peers.
• Having students write about what was meaningful on the trip and including stories in bulletin inserts or in online communication.
• Taking video of students sharing about the mission trip and sharing that video in church or online.

However you do it, recognize the importance of giving students a voice to share about this experience. Telling the story of their trip will aid their ongoing processing and help them find their place in their church context.

 

 

5. Post-Trip Processing

Students desperately need the opportunity to keep talking about their experiences. It’s true that a teenager’s processing won’t totally fit on a calendar, but some aspects of it can. And there should multiple touch points where you work to help students keep thinking about how their trip connects with their everyday life back home. You might do all or some of the following:

• Take an extra day at the end of the trip to exhale a little – maybe do something fun to create a little separation from the trip, then, that night, sit down together and look back at what just happened.
• Meet together a couple days after the trip to ask each other questions, process what coming home felt like (especially if it felt like this), and think about what you should do as a result of going on this trip.
• Have a reunion night a month later. Talk about what happened during the trip and how – and if – anything in your life has changed as a result of going.
• Grab coffee (or whatever) with individual team members and keep processing. Meet with leaders, parents and other invested people and encourage them to do the same. Take time to really listen to their story and ask lots of questions.

 

6. Integration Opportunities

In many ways, what happens after the trip legitimizes what happens during the trip.

 

Think about that for a second. If we’re going to call mission trips life-changing, we need to walk alongside students in that life-change. More than simply processing the experience, consider how you can help your students actually integrate the experience into their lives. Sometimes it’s through an event you put on your calendar and sometimes it’s through doing the already-scheduled stuff with additional intentionality.

• Schedule service opportunities that mirror the service you did during the trip. Better yet, have students select what ways they want to make service together a consistent part of their youth group experience.
• Give students a list of local ministries that parallel the service they did on their trip. (For example: “If you loved serving at the Boys and Girls Club, check out Mary’s Place, Healing Homes or the YMCA afterschool program.”) Encourage them to connect with or serve at an organization by a certain date, then gather and talk about their back-home service experience.
• Provide devotions for students to use when they get back from the trip. Help them make this a practice they don’t just do during the mission trip.
• Plan together how your youth group might stay connected with the community they just served through prayer, correspondence, helping meet material needs and even planning a return trip.
• Incorporate teaching and discussion about what makes meaningful service into your youth group meetings. When they return home, help students continue the learning process they started on the mission trip.

 

 

What other events around the mission trip do you have on your 2016 calendar? How are you helping your teenagers make their mission more than a trip?

 

 

 

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Sam Townsend helps write training, programming and marketing materials for YouthWorks mission trips. When he isn’t hanging around teenagers at church or digging into seminary homework, he is generally looking for a good conversation and a hole-in-the-wall restaurant to have it in. Sam still considers his first couple summers working for YouthWorks in Virginia and Pennsylvania communities some of the most transformative times of his life.