17 steps to a great residential

Weekends away, summer festivals, mission trips – they’re experiences of a lifetime for young people but logistical mountains for youth leaders. So how do you run a successful youth residential? Andy Hancock had the following advice in a recent Limitless podcast

Get practical

1. Plan early – doing this will help you to find space in your year to take kids away, to get the date out to parents early and to avoid venues booking up. Events can be cheaper if you book in advance too, and you could secure early bird prices. It also means you get dates in your team’s diaries – including the drivers, cooks and extra leaders you might need.

2. Sort out your catering – how do you cater for 10-50 kids in a field? Get the right catering team in place then delegate this area to them. You could hire a marquee or gazebo depending on the size of your group. Your chefs could cook in advance and freeze food if you don’t have far to travel, or do a chunk of the preparation before you leave.

3. Prepare for picky eaters – eating well is essential for physical and mental health so think about how you’ll handle this before you go. Put dietary requirements on consent forms, but think how you’ll handle fussy eaters too. Andy warns his teens they’ll have to stay with a youth leader for an entire afternoon if they don’t eat lunch. That soon gets them eating up!

4. Delegate! – residential trips are intense so don’t take everything on yourself. Andy says he sees his responsibilities as getting kids there safely, keeping them alive while they’re there, getting them home safely and pastoring them along the way, but that he doesn’t take charge of cooking, setting up tents etc. Delegate things like night duty, organising talks, activities and room allocation.

Money money money

5. Create a payment plan – booking early means you can help parents spread the cost via monthly payments. This could be especially helpful if they have more than one child to pay for.

6. Make it affordable – scale back your plans if everyone’s budgets are under pressure, or find ways to make things affordable for cash- strapped families. In addition to a payment plan, could you have a bursary fund, a special offering or sponsorship?

7. Budget for travel – it’s always more expensive than you think, so plan ahead or plan to travel more locally. Andy books trips no more than 45 minutes away to cut costs and to make it easy to ask people for lifts or donations towards travel.

Plan your programme

8. Sort out your slots – if you’re planning your own youth weekend include slots in your programme for main sessions and workshops, then add activities. Plan to get young people involved too – by leading into worship, sharing testimonies, doing interviews etc. Copy what works at bigger festivals.

9. Pack your timetable – Andy learned the hard way that activities need to be non-stop for 11-14s. An hour’s break after dinner on one trip led to meltdowns, arguments and breakages among his tired group. Now, when dessert finishes Tribe Wars begin immediately!

10. Have mega fun and mega moments – do the colour runs, foam parties, abseiling and canoeing that you wouldn’t do every day, then also carve out space for moments where young people can meet with Jesus. On Andy’s weekends, Saturday nights would include space for a gospel message, an opportunity to be filled with the Holy Spirit, for young people to offer their futures to God and so on.

11. Fight for sleep – plan how you’ll get your excited tribe to sleep. Aside from the fun, you’ve planned this trip to help them grow spiritually too and you don’t want your kids falling asleep in the main sessions. Quiet them down by midnight and especially plan how you’ll manage the first and last nights.

12. Lay out your guidelines – let kids know how you’ll handle discipline, including how you’ll communicate with parents. It might feel like a mood-killer but having clear boundaries will minimise the chance of things going wrong and reduce stress if they do.

13. Be kind to yourself – know your strengths, limits and capacity, and those of your team too.

The spiritual side

14. Pray into your theme – what does God want to say to your young people on this trip? Build the teaching programme around this. Know where your group is at too. Don’t plan a study of Leviticus for teens who haven’t yet heard about Jesus!

15. Carry the spiritual weight – this is why you delegate the food, transport and other practicalities. As the youth leader you need to lead spiritually, even if you have a guest speaker. That means praying and fasting in advance and seeking what God wants to say. When you’re there, the spiritual weight of the weekend is your responsibility.

After the event

16. Maximise it back home – you’re back at work, they’re back at school, so how do you maintain the impact of your trip in normal life? Use language relating to the theme or messages they heard while they were away in your weekly programme. Follow up by offering teens opportunities to sign up to serve at church and be baptised too.

17. Partner with parents – spiritual development doesn’t just lie with youth leaders. Be a spiritual parent to kids with non-Christian families but help equip Christian parents or carers to disciple their kids too. Email topics and talk outlines to help create conversations at home, share stories of what God’s been doing and ask your leaders to follow up with parents after your trip.

Why run residentials?

• To build relationships! Research shows you can do up six months’ worth of relationship building in a weekend away.
• To help kids take their next faith step – when you get kids away from daily distractions it creates space to build momentum in their faith.
• To reap faith seeds – have you ever noticed that as a youth leader you invest in your teens week after week and it feels like nothing’s happening, then when they give their testimony they say everything changed at a festival? Residential trips create focus times where months of sowing accelerate into moments of encounter.

Andy Hancock is associate pastor at Lifecentral in Halesowen and is on the Limitless leadership team. He has survived more than 70 youth residentials!

This article first appeared in May's edition of Direction Magazine. For further details please click here.

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