Working on youth retreat themes can be one of the most time-consuming aspects when planning a retreat.
In case you missed them the first time round, this week’s Best Of Youth Workin’ It therefore brings you 4 free retreat themes for you to use and build upon:
1. Self Esteem – This is a topic that brings hundreds of people to our site each week, as it’s one of the top issues facing young people.
A youth retreat can be a perfect opportunity to explore issues surrounding self esteem, as young people have more of an opportunity to stop and reflect on their life and how they see themselves. Significant change often happens on youth retreats, so focusing on self esteem can have a long lasting and positive impact on the lives of your teens that continues beyond the retreat.
2. Hunger – This retreat theme idea has many useful ideas for helping your young people gain a better understanding of hunger around the world, along with the challenges that billions face just to have enough to eat each day.
The theme has ideas for many different activities and discussions, as well as suggestions of ways your youth can make a difference even after the retreat’s over.
Make sure you also check out the comments, as TJ’s added a link to another useful resource that you can use.
3. Following Directions – Young people can sometimes have a hard time respecting authority, whether that’s at home, at school, in the community or somewhere else.
This retreat theme therefore covers the topic of following directions. That’s not to say that students should follow everything blindly and “be seen and not heard”; instead, this theme is to help them gain an understanding that following directions can often be beneficial for them and that most rules are there for a positive reason.
It contains all kinds of game ideas, activities, subjects to discuss, etc. Each idea has suggestions of how it could be used depending on whether you’re planning a faith based or non-faith based retreat.
4. Fruits Of The Spirit – As you might be able to tell by the name of the theme, this idea is specifically for a Christian youth retreat.
This theme includes ideas for activities, games, skits, meetings and even food (spoiler alert – fruit is involved).
And as a bonus……..
5. 40 Youth Retreat Theme Ideas – This post is actually a list of 40 different topics you could use as a retreat theme. It doesn’t go into detail like the four themes listed above, but they might give you some inspiration for ideas you could use.
We’ve also published a book called How To Plan A Youth Retreat that goes through the retreat planning process step-by-step. It’s perfect for any youth worker, but is especially useful if this is your first time planning a retreat. You can pick up a copy here.
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