Customer Reviews

Camps, Retreats, Missions, & Service Ideas for Youth Groups

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This book presents a series of themed retreats for youth groups. Each retreat has a lot of ideas for activities and games as well as a general outline of each retreat. Every activity idea is thoroughly tied in to the retreat theme. The retreats and their constituent activities are well-developed and fully fleshed out, and this is the main strength of the book. However, the ideas (and perhaps the authors) assume a youth group that is fully invested and fully committed. New youth groups, or groups struggling with Christian identity, or groups that would rather focus on mission--all these might have trouble buying into the various themes. Some of the activities seem, well, a little hokey--even for younger groups. Some of the other ideas are very good. In the end, there was not much originality here, just some very well-fleshed-out retreat plans. If you really want some good ideas for a youth retreat, get your youth together and ask them to help you plan it!

This book attempts to provide youth leaders with a series of retreat ideas, complete with component activities that teach the theme. In this respect, the authors succeed. However, anyone attempting to actually use the retreats as written will find themselves having to think up major alterations on the fly. Imposing packaged structure on a youth group works about as well as running a marathon with shoes you've never tried on. It just doesn't fit.

This book I actually bought for my daughter who will be working in a leadership position at a Christian camp this summer. I am hopeful that it will provide some useful information for her to better fullfill her job.