As a Religious Education Director for more than twenty years in a large suburban parish, it was my job annually to produce and direct teen retreats for young people in middle and high school. Some times the retreats lasted only a few hours but most lasted a full day. Trying to keep young people interested and on task for eight hours can really be a demanding job. Over the years, often from the young people themselves, I picked up a few pointers that might help others who are trying to build their own retreat programs. The bottom line is that you want young people to leave your retreat talking to one anther about how short the day was, how quickly time seemed to go by or how it really wasn’t as bad as they had imagined it would be. These are all kid codes for saying they enjoyed the experience and got something out of it. Using some of these tips might help youth leaders to elicit exactly those reactions.
Have Your Youth Help to Choose a Theme. As a youth leader, whether in a church or lay setting, you probably have already learned that young people really have a lot to offer. You can motivate young people by tapping in on their ability by inviting them to get involved in the production of their own retreat months before its scheduled date. Young people can become involved in many aspects of their retreat day, but the most obvious and easy route to large scale early involvement is to have young people brainstorm to determine the title theme of their own retreat.
Depending on the group, the words of this theme could reflect a spiritual concept, a community tradition, or a youth perspective. You can help kids to pick a theme by having them work in small groups and giving each group a sample of some possible retreat themes. Ask the groups to look at the list and either choose one of the listed themes or better yet come up with their own theme that they think really captures the spirit of what they will be trying to do at the retreat. You will notice that of course some groups will simply take the easy way out and just pick a theme from the list, others, and often not the ones you might suspect, will actually go creative and come up with something really unique.
Each small group can submit one or more choices .Then the full group can vote on the theme they want at a later meeting. . Make sure that all groups have an equal number of voting members otherwise it may simply come down to everyone voting for their own group’s choice. As long as the title fits within the general parameters of what you want to achieve at this retreat, let the title reflect the ideas of the participants. Knowing that they determined the title of their retreat rather than having it imposed upon them can give kids a positive attitude about the retreat day from the start.
Get One Good Speaker. With your title chosen you can now proceed to find one good speaker to be the main cog of your retreat program. You are looking for someone who has a real message that he can connect to the theme and the age group involved in your retreat. A good guideline is to recognize that kids relate best to other kids. A senior citizen might have the world’s best message to convey, but kids too often simply turn off when they see the gray hair. The experiences of older people seldom compute for kids as quickly or with as much force as the experiences of people who are only slightly older than themselves.
Your best choice might be someone who has only recently completed participation in the youth group with which you are working. He or she may have a reputation for reliability, brains, accomplishment, honesty. Naturally you would like the young person you select as your keynote speaker to have some speaking experiences or basic skills. My experience has been that kids are able to cut through the not too sophisticated style of another teen or young adult if that person has a real message and a lot of sincerity. When looking for a speaker for your youth retreat, try to imagine finding someone you would like one of your children to listen to. It’s a pretty safe rule.
If your speaker has lots of experiences, but not lots of speaking experience you need to be ready to step up and spend a little time with him or her to create a comfort zone. Remind them that this is not an address before Congress, it is talking to some young people who need to hear from someone close to their age, with a little experience and a lot of common sense. You may be surprised to see how well your young people react to the words of another young person, just marginally older than themselves. When thinking about how to run a youth retreat, give some serious consideration to finding one good and relevant speaker.
Build a varied schedule of activities. An important part of knowing how to run a youth retreat is knowing how to select and schedule activities. You probably have already discovered that there are literally hundreds of books with youth retreat activities arranged by age and interest. It is unlikely that you will find difficulty finding activities. The skill of running a youth retreat really lies in part in knowing how to select a variety of activities and how to intersperse them throughout the day.
The word “One” is an important word when you are thinking about how to run a youth retreat. Saying “one ” to myself when planning a retreat often helped me to remember not to get carried away with a certain genre of activity that appealed to me. Just because I might like crafts, it would be inappropriate and really, really bad planning to have more than one ( two at the most) craft activity during the day. Knowing how to run a youth retreat means recognizing that your youth group is diverse in at least one way, their taste in activities. It is very unlikely that you are going to have a group of thirty kids all of whom want to spend the day doing crafts all day. So as you look at prospective activities you need to work hard at providing a variety of activity types.
You will also want to consider the level of motion involved in your activity choices. Too many sitting activities will make people feel like nodding off, especially after lunch. But too many high energy activities back to back can make it difficult to keep or regain control of the group when the activities wind down. Balance is what you are looking for. As you make your schedule try to alternate quiet and noisy activities, interactive and passive segments.
Skits, art work, small group discussions, a film, a speaker may all be excellent blocks for your retreat day. But spend time considering the merits of different ways of balancing these activities and the best placement in the retreat day for each. What is a good activity to get things started? What should you do right before or right after lunch.? How about a conclusion? Building your schedule when you are trying to run a youth retreat means trying to create a workable rhythm for the day. And of course as you plan, always have in mind the young people with whom you are working. If you can’t imagine them doing a particular activity you may want to give it a second thought.
Have a few good rules for the day. For some of the young people in your retreat group, going on a day long retreat may be a totally new experience. They may be less than comfortable with the idea, with the group and with you. You can help everyone to feel more relaxed about the day and what is expected of them if you begin the retreat day with a generous welcome and some very basic but very clear rules.
Young people should be instructed about the use of the building. For example are there sections of the building that are off limits, where are the rest rooms and fire exits and are they allowed to go outside of the building for any reason? What kinds of behaviors are expected while they are on retreat? Is there a no smoking rule? How will the retreat operate, what kinds of things will they be doing, with whom will they be grouped and of course everyone’s favorite, what time is lunch? You know the answer to all of these questions but for young people the whole event may seem very foreign. Letting young people in on the rules of operation for the day gets everyone into the same boat before you cast off. One of the most important things to remember about how to run a youth retreat is to keep the kids well informed about what is being asked of them.
Get good help. If you want to know how to run a youth retreat include the idea that you can’t run it by yourself. No matter how small the group is, for safety purposes you should always have some kind of back up personnel to help out. In most cases you are going to want anywhere from half dozen helpers or more. You will need people to assist with lunch, some activities, serving as gophers, and acting as positive support for kids and for you.
In my experience, too much attention has sometimes been given to having lots of adult helpers around. After several years of recruiting and using adults as helpers I began to realize that while the adults were very willing, some of them were a little uncomfortable with groups of young people and would instead tend to congregate in their own group, defeating the purpose of their presence. If asked to do something they often responded with another suggestion of how to do what I was asking, rather than just completing the task or they would need a full explanation of why I had chosen a particular activity in the first place.
When you are running a youth retreat, time is of the essence. You really want helpers who will simply respond to your needs quickly and who will save questions and suggestions to a later time. Finally it came to me that really the best people I could have as helpers were teens or people in their early twenties who had gone through a similar retreat with me within the last 5 years or so. These young people knew what was happening and could also anticipate problems. They knew some of the activities that would be used and best of all they didn’t even consider questioning me about what I was doing or why. They just performed. They enjoyed their advanced status and they worked very hard . it was truly one of the best alterations I made in running retreats over twenty years. I wouldn’t go back to using adults unless I absolutely had to.
If you are planning a youth retreat, don’t panic. There are plenty of booklets out there that will provide you with ideas for films, music, themes, and activities. Organizing these activities to produce a retreat that kids will say really “flew by” can be as easy as using some of these very basic tips for how to run a youth retreat. What I always found was that if you can produce a retreat that goes by quickly for them, you can only imagine how quickly it will go by for you.
