LeaderShop 2025: Serving Our Youth Leaders Into the Future

This past weekend, over 80 youth leaders and young leaders got together at Camp Wakonda to learn best practices in youth ministry leadership, network with others in the Wisconsin field, and attain resources that will aid them on their quest to bring young people to Jesus. This was a great year, not only because of the numbers of attendance, but also because of the number of clubs that were represented. Only two of our current 20 Wisconsin Pathfinder Clubs were not represented, and six Adventurer Clubs, as well as one Master Guide Club were officially represented. This marks a growth in the reach that this event is having within our conference, as more clubs were represented than in the past, in every club category.

LeaderShop 2025 Attendees

Our speakers were Lyle and Ann Petry, who are seasoned veterans in youth ministry leadership, and have been all around the country and world, training youth leaders. They presented on various topics from the AYMT catalog, like "mentoring club staff," "resolving conflict," and "working with the local church board and conference." They also brought many helpful answers to specific questions our leaders had about youth and club ministry, as well as helpful info about resources that could be helpful to our Conference and clubs. It was a blessing to have them join us for the weekend!

As always, a big part of the big picture of this event is to foster relationships between our leaders from around Wisconsin. In order to further that goal, we played several games and provided ample opportunity for getting to know each other and networking. TLTs, additionally, were given the opportunity to do a fun camp activity together.

In addition, Sunday of LeaderShop has become an excellent opportunity for the Youth Department to connect with club leaders in order to educate about conference expectations, to introduce leaders to conference resources, to announce upcoming events and how to prepare for them, and to help club leaders get to know their Area Coordinators. For the first time in several years, we set up a store Sunday morning, so that leaders could buy some of the excellent new resources AdventSource has produced to help club leaders in their ministry. One specific new resource is the Pathfinder Club Handbook--an excellent collection of information that helps give a well-rounded idea of what it looks like to run a club, and how to do it well. We were also able to provide translation for Spanish-speaking leaders for the first time, thanks to some new translation headsets we purchased last year. The translation was well received, and we want to give a special shoutout to Area Coordinators AnaYancy and Viviana, who provided translation all weekend long. This is a service that we are going to expand upon for future events, as there is a true need for it in our conference.

LeaderShop translation team

Our Coordinator team is getting together in November to discuss future plans for LeaderShop and other Club Ministry events. We're having exciting conversations right now about the possibilities of what LeaderShop can be, if we expand it a little bit. Between this year and last year's events, we believe we've seen the best of this version of this event. Our goal is to make it an unmissable event over the next five years, and we've got some ideas about how to take it to that level. Stay tuned! God has big plans for our youth leaders, and the Wisconsin Conference is committed to providing the best help to them as they follow the Lord's calling in leading our young people to Jesus.