5 Great Tips To Help Lead A Successful Youth Retreat

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Someone recently asked me… “Why should I consider doing all the work it requires to take my small youth group on a retreat?”. At first, I was tempted to give a really short answer like… “Because they’re great!”. But, after thinking about it for a few seconds, it gave me the chance to think more deeply before I responded. The best answer I could come up with was this… “Because it has the opportunity to fundamentally change your group in so many ways.” 

Let’s take a quick look at that bold claim and see if you agree that retreats are a great way to build up your group.

As we all know, God has created us to be people of community. It can be hard to love someone when you keep them at arm’s reach. A group is really not much of a group unless they are spending quality time together and deliberately building bridges of connection between one another. It allows people to minister to each other’s wounds and alleviate each other’s doubts. This is particularly important for young people who often struggle with challenges and don’t often realize they are not on their own. The great part of effective retreats is they give you the opportunity to do real ministry.

When planned carefully and led with informed intention, the time and work that goes into a weekend retreat is eclipsed many times over by the value of time spent together. Whether you are planning a youth ministry winter retreat or you are leading a multigenerational group, retreats offer the potential for a mountaintop experience. Let’s look at some of the specific benefits that you can look forward to enjoying when you take this leap. We’ll break it down into five concrete ideas in order to make your next retreat a success.

5 Tips To Help Lead A Successful Youth Retreat

1. Build On The Strongest Foundation

First, don’t forget to incorporate prayer and scripture throughout the entire process. For you, that starts from the very beginning. In other words, don’t neglect to involve God in your creation. While that starts with you in the planning process, make sure it continues throughout the retreat. An outside observer should easily be able to understand that this is not just a random group of young people spending time together. It should be abundantly clear that yours is a Christian group with God at its very center who make their faith a priority.

So, make sure your sessions and activities are built on a firm foundation of scriptural truth. When you include scripture and prayer in every part of your time together, you make it clear who and whose you are. All of us struggle with relying too much on our own understanding. When we do that, we don’t make room for God. Remember, as we are told in Jeremiah 29, God has plans for us to prosper and not to fail. When we trust God to provide, it speaks volumes about where our true faith is based.

Exposing young adults to scripture and building healthy personal prayer habits also builds strong believers who are better able to face the world’s challenges. For the budget-conscious of us, the great news is this tip costs us absolutely nothing to incorporate. Our next tip allows us to take it a step further.

2. Make Faith Building An Active Process!

When we only speak our faith and do not put action into words, our faith rings hollow to ourselves and those around us. Make sure you are teaching in an active way in order to make it more real and memorable. Most of us retain what we learn better if we experience it rather than just hear it spoken to us. In other words, we learn better by doing.

The great news is that retreats are the perfect place to try new things and take big steps! When you’ve created a safe space with a group of friends who support one another, it makes it easier to take chances and not be afraid to fail. Look for ways to make your teaching style more unique and memorable.

This can be achieved by undertaking new ways to practice your faith that shake up the status quo and develop some new “faith muscles” and habits. This is done in order to grow and strengthen their faith and make it a vital and real part of their lives. Faith put into action is by definition dynamic and moving. Exploring a valuable theme together helps to make new connections in your own faith life as well as build up the group of believers.

Try at least a few new ways to approach prayer and scripture study while on your retreat. Our group has practiced things like: extended times of silence, blindfolded scripture study, lectio divina, labyrinth walking, and shouted exclamations of faith. There are many more ways to try new ways to invigorate our faith.

For example: study scripture by trying your hand at translating scripture into sign language, fill the walls of your retreat site with scriptures written on small colorful Post-It notes, try to decipher scripture while reading over your shoulder with a handheld mirror or reassembling a scripture passage word for word from a giant bag of mismatched paper that had been run through a paper shredder. One time I even had our group become amateur archaeologists by digging up some “tablet fragments” I had buried weeks before the retreat.

Being on retreat gives you the time and the lack of distractions to focus on Him and His Word. You can take this time to try new ways to look at the same theme and begin to form new habits to revive your faith and help it grow. If spiritual growth is your goal, retreats help you turbocharge your ministry.

3. Be Deliberate About Building Relationships

The safe environment of a retreat is the perfect place to stretch your faith muscles and take big steps in your personal life. When building stronger relationships is your goal, you have to make it easy for young people to share their lives with each other. In order to do that, look for fun ways to allow people to share their story. Our organization ActuallyFun has spent the last two years trying to do exactly that. We have created dozens of free game tutorials to equip youth leaders, and we have developed additional resources to help you grow deeper with your group.

Our mission is to make it as easy as possible for leaders to build relationships through fun and active learning, which is key to creating a meaningful group.  Whatever you choose to do, make sure it’s done in a way that your group is ready to attempt. I never ask too much of my group before I believe they are ready for it. You’ve got to build the connections before you ask your group to take a chance and share their inner selves. 

Build those bridges before you attempt to tear down the walls. This is often best achieved in small groups because smaller numbers make sharing easier. But, bringing it back to the larger group is also important so that everyone can grow closer through the experience.

4. Everyone Loves SWAG!

Making memories is easy but needs to be carefully planned to ensure that the memories made are of the best kind. I make sure every person on my retreats goes home with at least: one small object, a new article of group gear, a small trinket to display in their personal space, or at the very least some special keepsake. For example, these can be things like: 

• A special container filled with notes of affirmation
• A new object to display on their backpack/phone case
• A unique handmade item that only those who went on the retreat will own
• Anything that has some meaning behind it 

I want to make sure our time together is not easily forgotten and they are able to remember that they are special and changed by the experience. This can easily be done on a tight budget. It’s not about the amount of money you spend, it’s about the meaning behind the item.

Personally, I love coming home from a retreat and taking some time to read notes of affirmation created by my friends who have taken the time to lift me up. As the adult leader, this type of activity gives you the perfect chance to address individual concerns and be deliberate about letting a member of your group know you care about them. It’s the perfect way to fulfill the scriptural call to love one another.

Groups that experience these kinds of shared milestones want to share the experience with others. They naturally want to tell stories about what they did on the retreat, which builds excitement in other group members for the next retreat. Hopefully, they will evangelize and share the lessons learned with their friends and family. Retreats often result in a sort of “pay it forward attitude” because when people experience something awesome they often want to tell others about it. 

5. Be Extravagant … But Don’t Break The Bank

Be bold and try big things! That doesn’t mean things need to be expensive. It just means that you should think big when planning rather than limit your potential by focusing on all the hurdles along the way. This is about your mindset as a leader and making sure you are setting a big enough goal for your ministry. There are endless varieties of retreat themes you can run. Retreats can build around a servant ministry experience, a holiday celebration, or a specific biblical theme.

You can even go on a church seasonal learning journey. And don’t forget about  Women’s or Men’s groups as well as the all-important Family ministry. Once retreats become a valued part of your ministry, you’ll always be looking for new ways to maximize your ministry’s reach using this amazing tool. A retreat does not need to break the bank and there are lots of ways to minimize the cost without limiting the impact. Things like: cooking your own food, trading some outdoor cleanup work done around the retreat facility to receive a discount on the rental fee or the off-season use of a facility during times of cheaper rates can all be effective ways to reduce costs.

One of my favorite retreats was held at a timeshare property owned by one of our church families who were looking for a way to support the ministry. A fancy retreat center is nice, but don’t think that you absolutely need an over-the-top location to make a big impact. If it works for you, don’t be afraid to search out sponsors to help offset the costs for youth families, particularly if they have more than one child attending the event. Many of the resources we offer at ActuallyFun are meant to have the biggest possible positive impact while keeping costs low, so I can tell you firsthand that it is possible!

Be Bold And Take The Leap

Despite the size of your group, or even the age of your group, spending deliberate time together and experiencing all that a good retreat has to offer revitalizes your group. Big topics can be explored in a meaningful way that shorter-duration activities can’t achieve. Small groups benefit just as much if not more than larger groups because each individual plays a bigger part in the group as a whole.

Shared life experiences between the group’s members unite them in ways that can’t be achieved without adequate time spent together working toward a shared goal. And perhaps most importantly, “retreating” is so important that Jesus practiced it throughout His ministry both alone and with His disciples. Going away from the crowds that followed Him and going into the wilderness allowed Jesus, and His disciples, to remove themselves from the noise that surrounded them in their public lives and their ministry.

These times away gave them the opportunity to recharge, renew, and refocus. All of us get caught up in the busyness of our daily lives and we often don’t even realize the “noise” that surrounds us which can make it really hard to hear God’s “still, small voice” that we need to direct us in the way we should go. The opportunity for real personal and faith growth is perhaps the best reason to schedule a retreat.

I firmly believe that every group of Christians needs to follow Christ’s example to pull back from the world and spend some deliberate time with God and other believers. Retreats make your ministry special no matter the size of your ministry. Small churches benefit just as much, if not more so, than larger groups given the fact that the larger a group becomes, the harder it can be to truly get to know everyone.

An effective and impactful retreat can be a lot of work, but add one to your calendar and then be ready for your work to be multiplied tenfold once the Holy Spirit takes over. Do the work, plan it thoroughly, pray throughout the process, base it on scriptural truth, and then get out of the way and let God be God. 

Read More:

Incorporating Mental Health Awareness Into Youth Ministry 

6 Best Youth Activities That Focus On Spiritual Growth

5 Steps To A Perfect Lock-In For A Small Youth Group