A Christian gap year program is usually a one-year (9-12 months) educational experience designed to help young people moving from one stage in life to another — usually from high school to college or the workforce — discover their direction or life calling, develop essential life skills, and prepare for an effective launch into their next steps in life. These programs are usually hosted by Christian camps or mission organizations able to offer personal mentoring and robust experiences that challenge students to develop healthy and holistic learning and life skills with strong biblical foundations.

Typically, gap year programs run 9 to 12 months. Think of them as a school year alternative. Some may run as little as 6 months and others more than a year.

There are generally two areas of focus, context and curriculum.

Context is the experiential aspect of the program. Whether a program is staged at at Christian camp or in a cross-cultural environment, there are rich opportunities to design powerful teaching and learning experiences for program students. Each context is unique and offers its own mix of opportunities.

Curriculum is the structured program design that injects content and coaching into the learning environment. Some programs feel a lot more like a traditional school approach, with lectures, homework, and discussions. Others feel very fluid and experiential. But almost all Christian gap year programs will focus in on developing strong Bible foundations, a functional biblical worldview, core life skills (decision-making, personal finance, critical thinking, people skills), and identifying personal life direction.

That varies from program to program. But generally, Christian gap year programs will enroll students from 18 (right out of high school) to 22 (right out of college). Usually they are looking for students that are at life transition points, whether that’s prior to college, mid-college, or between college and graduate school, professional life, etc…

There are several common challenges we see when setting up — or rethinking — a Christian Gap Year program. Here are the big ones:

*Recruiting — From messaging to finding potential students to filtering applicants in their admissions process, filling a program with the ideal student (for that unique program) can make or break the experience for everyone involved.

*Curriculum Design — Most ministries that aspire to launch a gap year program are already great at doing ministry. Many are great at intentional discipleship within their existing programs. But the leap to a 9-month hosted onsite program benefits requires a different skillset. Seeing AND structuring intentional opportunities for formation takes some experience — or it can be very draining.

*Academic Delivery — The biggest off ramp of potential gap year students is “losing a year”. Having the opportunity to earn credit toward college is a huge bonus for recruiting. But designing academic delivery as a tool — not just a feature — that is tuned to elevate program outcomes AND plug into a wide array of next steps requires understanding both ends of the process. And very few ministries have that capacity in-house. So they settle for an expensive (time and money) bolt on alternative feature and forfeit opportunities to leverage what makes them a unique alternative for a student’s journey.

Like any program you launch, that depends on some key strategic decisions and what latent resources you already have.

Your biggest expenses will be personnel, housing, food, and any baked in program elements like travel, learning resources, etc…, plus your investment in marketing the program. For instance, a Christian camp may create a hybrid role that pairs Summer program director responsibilities with the gap program director role. That same camp may use existing all-weather cabins during their offseason to house gap year students without incurring much more than additional utility costs.

On the revenue side, you can set program tuition based on your strategy… for income, for neutral cash flow, or recognizing a net negative that will be offset by giving students responsibilities that will save payroll elsewhere in the budget.

When we partner, we partner. We don’t charge a fee to walk with your organization through our Accelerated Design Process. It’s our investment in the missional success of your program. When students enroll with one of our partner universities, a portion of their (usually discounted) tuition flows to us for facilitating academic delivery. So we’ve aligned our outcomes to your success. And it doesn’t cost you anything.