Youth Ministry At It's Finest

Last night was the first ever INTRSCT all nighter. Needless to say, it was humorous, it was youthful, it was ministry, ministry like I’ve been taught not to do.

The night started off with nearly fifty jr. high and high school students pouring into a church. This was seemingly normal for a youth event, then as we proceeded with the night it dawned upon me, we have no permission slips, no contact information for the students, in fact our leader, Dave, asked if I thought it would be a good idea to write down the kids names to know who was there…In my wisdom, I said yes of coarse.

Finally when the kids had all arrived and were running around rampantly, we had our planning meeting for the event. It was hard to concentrate as all the kids we running around but we had the night planned out after 15 minutes.

The night had all the elements of a normal youth event. Food, worship, message, games, sports, movies, racing throughout downtown Chicago in our cars to the soccer facility where we spent most of the night.

Surprisingly enough, it went smoothly. In all honesty it was the most intense and exciting overnighter I can recall participating in.

I can’t say there is a formula to youth ministry even though it seems each youth leader has their own philosophy as to “what works” and “what doesn’t.” I think the truth is we all make it up as we go trying to act like we know exactly what we’re doing.

This worked though, I don’t know how but it worked. Kids actually responded to the gospel, kids who’ve never attended church. It went against everything that I was taught in college about event planning. I guess we never talked about inner city ministry in college though. Either way, it doesn’t make sense. “If we fail to plan, we plan to fail.” Maybe, but ironically this worked, no plan…no real anything but Jesus, soccer balls, pizza, and a few guys dumb enough to think it could actually work…