We are excited to have you join YOUTH 2023 in Daytona Beach, Florida! While together on the beach, we will have an opportunity to consider what it means to be BOLD: BEING OURSELVES & LIVING DIFFERENT!

This resource includes four sessions created by the YOUTH 2023 Design Team and Young People’s Ministries staff at Discipleship Ministries. The four sessions in this resource are meant for either individual or group use in preparation for our time together in Daytona Beach, Florida. Think of it as a way to “step on the sand and tap your toes in the water” before arriving at YOUTH 2023. Or think about it like appetizers to get you familiar with the theme of YOUTH 2023 and get you hungrier for the main course in Florida. You can read and do these exercises by yourself or perhaps together with others who will attend YOUTH 2023 alongside you!

DOWNLOAD Preparing to be BOLD (PDF)

The more reflection and conversation you or your group have around the theme of BEING OURSELVES & LIVING DIFFERENT before arriving at YOUTH 2023, the more opportunities you will have to grow in faith and experience the power of Christ in transforming ways. All of this will help us all return home to be BOLD in our faith and in making and maturing disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world!

In these four sessions, we invite you to reflect on how someone may come to live boldly as a disciple of Jesus, pressing on and pursuing discipleship, even when it is challenging or life is hard, through the four basic movements of a hero’s journey.

In the first session, we will focus on our introduction to the hero (in this case, the disciple) and learn that the hero wants or desires something. In session two, we will reflect on a disciple’s search and his/her crossing a threshold into something new. In session three, we will engage with the disciple after he/she finds what he/she sought, but we’ll discover that the finding comes at a cost. And in the final session, we will explore what it is like when the disciple returns home and is changed by the experience.

Throughout each session, we will draw from fictional and real-life heroes, depicted in movies, scripture, and/or the news to explore our YOUTH 2023 theme of BOLD: BEING OURSELVES & LIVING DIFFERENT. In the sessions that follow, we invite you to reflect on how a person may come to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ. Each of these sessions is written and designed so that youth could complete them as individuals or together as a whole youth group. We hope that this resource will be beneficial to you and/or your small group as you prepare for YOUTH 2023. We can’t wait to join you for some fun in the sun this July!