The Six-Week Send-Off
A free discussion guide for youth leaders, pastors, and parents sending seniors to college.
Two-thirds of students raised in church stop attending for at least a year between eighteen and twenty-two. The number one reason they give is not a professor and it is not the culture. It is that they moved. The second and third reasons are that church people seemed judgmental, and that they stopped feeling connected to anyone there.
Those aren't arguments. They're wounds, and they're the ones this is built to work on.
The Six-Week Send-Off maps the ninety days of Nobody Knows You Here onto six one-hour sessions you can run with a graduating class in the spring. Every session is written out: what to open with, what to read aloud, the questions, and the one thing they do before next week. You do not need to be a counselor to lead it.
- Six complete sessions, about an hour each
- Ground rules that make the room safe enough to say the unimpressive thing
- A safety page for the clinical session — what to do when a student tells you something hard, written by a licensed clinical social worker
- A closing move that costs you four minutes and is the most useful thing in the whole guide
Check your email. The guide is on its way — look for a message from Hector Figueroa. If you don't see it within a few minutes, check your spam folder.