A Simple Way To Celebrate Your Young Life Team

September 24th.

There’s a 0.3% chance that date actually means anything to you. However, for me, it’s a super important day because that’s the day I was born.

What does that have to do with Young Life?

For the past several years, our Young Life team has entered into a rhythm of intentionally celebrating the birthdays of everyone on our team. When it’s getting close to someone’s birthday, the rest of us conspire to come up with something really awesome to give them. Sometimes we’ll text their significant other, spouse, or best friend and find out something they’ve mentioned they would like to have. Everybody will then chip in a few bucks, buy the gift, and celebrate them at the leader meeting closest to their birthday. Along with the gift, we each go around and say something specific about them in a way that builds them up and speaks life over them.

This is a super simple rhythm. The gift doesn’t have to be anything big. My team has usually kept it in the ballpark of $50 or so, so it’s something significant and nice, but nothing too crazy. For our team, it’s like $8/person. And the thoughtfulness of the gift usually means a ton to the recipient as well as the verbal encouragement by their teammates. It’s also a rhythm that could work with your Campaigners group as well as your Young Life team. It’s a chance to model honoring one another.

We tend to overcomplicate things, but birthdays are actually an incredibly simple way of making everyone on your team feel noticed, honored, and celebrated. When we celebrate birthdays, we’re not celebrating accomplishments or what anyone has produced. We’re simply honoring God as their creator and celebrating His unique thumbprint on their life.