Outside of your daily grind of youth ministry you are going to want to introduce the youth to God, their community, and the world outside of the city at a deeper level. I think it is vitally important to take kids on a yearly journey outside of themselves and the “me centered” society we find ourselves in. You can accomplish this by having a spiritual retreat, a local missions trip, and a fundraising talent show.
The Spiritual Retreat
We start planning this event around January and actually pull it off the 3rd weekend in March. So that gives us about two and a half months to plan, organize and execute the event. The Spiritual Retreat is a moment in the kids lives where we try our very hardest to connect them with God on a deep level. We leave on a friday night after school and return sunday afternoon. We usually book the retreat at a conference center about one hour away from the city. It is usually a place in the woods with quiet, rivers, lakes, tree’s and no technology. YMCA, and Salvation Army camps do the trick.
After the check in, and final payments the kids and their luggage is loaded onto the bus. They enjoy a granola bar and video complementary of the Tech Team. The video is made up of you tube videos, christian video’s, video’s our leadership team makes. It’s a lot of fun and its a chance for the kids to unwind a bit. Once we arrive at the retreat center we have a team offload the luggage into the respective cabins. Guys usually stay on one side, and girls on the other. The kids are then herded into the main meeting room where they come face to face with a room set up with the theme of the weekend in mind. There is music playing, lights flashing, tons of visual stimulation and the cheapest dinner we can conjure up. Hot dogs, PB and J, Pizza, Fried Chicken, you get the idea. We welcome them and play a rules video that is fun and creative. One year we had Fandango paper bags explaining the rules, the next year we had Jay Leno celebrity faces with moving lips. For a couple of years we had super hero’s called enforcers . This was a set of videos displaying leaders wearing cheep Halloween masks beating the crap out of kids who broke the rules. It was a riot. Keep the rules fun, simple and to the point. After the video we hand out the schedule for the weekend that are the size of concert badges. Schedual on one side, and the rules on the other. These are to be worn at all times during the retreat by the youth. We sit them down and bring in some guest entertainment ranging from christian rappers, to dave the horn guy. Something different to entertain them for a bit. As soon as the entertainment is over we split them into teams and do organized team games until about midnight. This is when we send them of to their rooms to wash up, bed down and get some sleep for the next day. Realistically they horse around, talk about who is hot, and joke with each other until about 4 in the morning.
We get them up around 7 so they can shower and get dressed at which point each room does a morning devotion with the kids on the weekends theme. Eight thirty is breakfast. Ten oclock is our first session. The session usually lasts about two hours. The standard worship, teaching and altar call for change. You will want to deploy your best gifted teachers during these sessions. Because if your kids are anything like mine, they have a ten minute attention span and are extremely new to the idea of church. Twelve thirty is lunch. Two oclock is the second session. Again your standard worship, teaching and altar call for change. The kids then enjoy free time until dinner at six. We usually try to hook up a list of organized games and set up a little prayer room for kids to enjoy. Eight oclock is our final session. This is the homerun session. You want your best worship set, best teacher, best creative altar call to be deployed. Most of the time this session lasts until about eleven oclock because of the prayers and the way God shows up. At around eleven thirty we have the kids do a talent show. This is really cool way to wind down the night and let the kids show off a bit. Once the talent show is over we head back to the rooms for some much needed sleep. Realistically this is where the kids start talking about how God met them, and how for the first time they feel at peace. This lasts till about four in the morning. Have you figured out that you are not getting any sleep this weekend?
Sunday morning we wake around seven again and do room devotions. Eight thirty is breakfast and ten oclock is our final session. We usually sing a couple of songs and have the kids come up and share how they met God. The stories are unique, real, and are very touching. Twelve thirty we pack up, clean our rooms, eat another very cheap meal and load the buses. The end.
I shared briefly how we run our retreat, but it doesn’t really matter how you run it, as long as your run it. You know what your kids will connect with more than I do. I just wanted to encourage you to get them out of their enviroment and into a place that is quiet and distraction free. A place where they have a chance to choose God for themselves.
The mission trip
We struggled for years because we wanted to give our youth a oppurtunity to give back and serve. The experience a mission trip offers is life changing. The unfortunate thing is these life changing experiences often cost a lot of doe. We were faced with a challenge. How do we get these kids on a mission trip for less than one hundred and fifty dollars? My big Cuban friend came to the rescue once again. He suggested we stay right in the city and do the trip. There was a local Marriot that we could stay at and plenty of poor unfortunate souls to help out. (Big ups to the little mermaid). E-town mission was born. We took about twenty youth, ten leaders and booked the Marriot for a week. Parks and city blocks were cleaned, adult day care centers were visited, vacation bible schools were enhanced, homeless were fed, random people were prayed for, served, and filled with joy. Most important the kids lives were changed as they entered the mission field of their own neighborhood. As we did this I found how easy it is to go somewhere far away and be a christian. You have nothing to lose. It’s another thing to be a christian in your own backyard with people you see everyday. I feel you have to be a far braver person. The kids are.
So how did we break it down. It was four days of work one day of Dorney Park/ Wildwater Kingdom. Lets tackle the work days and then you can tailor it to your city. We had two full day saturday meetings for the team before the trip started. We went over songs to be sung for vacation bible school and the adult day care centers. We taught them how to safely handle dirty condoms and hypodermic needles they would find on the street and in the park. We practiced simple prayers to say with people and what Jesus meant by laying your life down. The trip started on a monday. As soon as the kids arrive they place their bags in their rooms and meet in the lobby for crew assignments and weekly schedule. The day was split up like this.
7:00 – 8:00 Get up, Pray, Breakfast (The hotel supplied breakfast)
9:00 – 12:00 Morning Work shift (Teams were either Cleaning Parks or city streets, Visiting kids or old people, Feeding the homeless etc)
12:00 – 1:00 Lunch (You have to budget and plan for the daily lunches. PB&J, Hot Dogs, Sandwiches, Pizza)
1:00 – 4:00 Afternoon Work shift (Teams were either Cleaning Parks or city streets, Visiting kids or old people, Feeding the homeless etc)
4:00 – 5:00 Return to the Hotel, Shower and Clean up
5:00 – 7:00 Dinner (Find a family in the church to host a dinner for each day of the week)
7:00 – 9:00 Activity (Find cheap activities for the kids like bowling, kickball at the park, mini golf, dollar theatre, a pool etc.)
9:00 – 10:00 Return to hotel and get hang out for a little bit.
10:00 – 12:00 Ministry Time (Most hotels have a little conference room to meet in. Ask if you could use it every night at this time. Chances are nobody will want it at this time. Use these meetings to debrief the entire team. Have each team share moments where they saw God in their day. Have someone do a short 10 minute teaching and play a couple of worship songs on a boombox. Use this time to let the Holy Spirit lead you to pray for the kids and offer words of encouragement. These meetings will fill the kids souls after a day off pouring themselves out.
Thats it. that is our daily routine on the mission trip. The hardest part about it all is the planning and scheduling with the organizations you plan to serve. But once thats settled the week is a breeze. And about Dorny Park. That is what sells the trip to the kids. A chance to hit an amusement park all day. But by the end thats not really the day they remember.
The Fundraising Talent Show
We are constantly teaching the kids that God wants to use them to heal a broken world. No good teaching them if we don’t give them the opportunity to actually do it. As we sat and tried to figure out ways of raising money for world causes like water wheels in africa, tsunami victims in south east asia. Things like plays, coin jugs, mix tapes, and begging popped up, but they didn’t really sit right in our heart because it was very “us” focused. The one thing we all agreed on was a talent show. This show could pull in all sorts of acts and people from across the city. It would be a city wide event. One night were people could put their personal beliefs aside and really do some good in the world. Hitting the ground running we booked the local high schools auditorium and made some really dope t-shirts to sell. Local dance studios, museums, steppers, poets, bands, organizations, and businesses signed on. We really didn’t have to pay anyone or twist arms to get involved. Although we would always love a better turnout our goals of raising money and helping the kids heal a broken world are alway met. So where do the kids come in? They sell tickets and t-shirts, go door to door with local business to buy ads in the program. They sing, dance, and rap in the show. They usher, do back stage work, paint pictures for the silent auction and serve the artists performing. We get them involved in any way we can. It’s awesome to see them being part of something so much bigger than themselves.
We figured our show should be about an hour and a half long and that each act should be about six minutes each with a twenty minute intermission. If we did the math considering a ten minute intro and outro that left us room for about ten acts with some buffer minutes in between.
Here is a simple show breakdown:
2:00 – 4:00 Set up sound and lights
4:00 – 6:00 Sound checks for artists (Decorate Theatre and set up Merchandise Tables)
6:00 – 6:30 Pray
6:30 – 7:00 Open Doors
7:15 – Introduction followed by first 5-6 acts with giveaways and candy being thrown to the audience in between
8:00 – Intermission
8:20 – 5-6 acts closed by the outroduction with giveaways and candy being thrown to the audience in between
8:45 Goodnight
I know this seems like a lot of work. But I guarantee, you can pull off these events with minimum manpower. The benefits of taking your team and kids through this kind of yearly journey will not only affect their souls , but your community and the world around them. I was in Jerusalem one year serving as an EMT on a team that brought medical aid to oppressed people in Palestine. It was awesome. The garden of Gethsemane was a major highlight for me. I remember looking out over the olive tree’s when my pastor sat next to me. What he said was life changing. He said, “Kevin, you know what the most amazing thing is about this place? Jesus changed the world all within twenty five square miles”. It is not far fetched to think our kids can do the same. If we could only manage to introduce them to God, their community, and the world.
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