My Experience as Youth Pastor

Last night was a blast. I'm pretty exhausted right now. We started selling Monster on a trial basis in our snack shop. I'm not sure if this will be a good plan in the long run but to be honest most of the ones that will buy it drop by the store and pick one up on the way in so if I sell then I make money on dealing with the hyper which is always a win in my book.

We had about 50 and the place was pretty well packed. I need to bring up more seating because the seats were pretty well all used. I've been told they had 70 a few years back but I'm honestly not sure how you fit that many into that place. It was feeling pretty cramped with 50. I'll probably start doing break outs again. Not every week to start with but we will build towards an upper and lower Youth group because we will reach our capacity very soon otherwise.

Now for the breakdown of the games.

This was moderately fun at best. I picked tow girls expecting them to have ticklish feet. They admitted to it when questioned but there was much less squirming than I expected. I would recommend as a simple ice breaker to begin bringing the focus in while getting something else ready that will only take a minute or two. That is what I did with the game and it filled the space of pulling out other supplies just fine. Don't expect a lot from it. It is easy to get started and takes up a couple minutes but that is about it.


This was actually pretty fun. I think the students enjoyed the Pizza more than anything but it added to the excitement. If you can pull it off next time you order Pizza for the Youth it adds to it. We gave the winner a $20 tip and the loser a $5 tip. I also asked the winner some questions. The nice part was that he knew several of the youth so they were really excited to see him win.



This is just a great game. It got messier last night than in previous nights but every had a great time. We had a few that made it across without killing any fish but there were also a couple of really good reactions so it makes it worth while. The only problem with this game is you can't really go to it very often unless you have lots and lots of new people coming.



This went over better than I expected. I planned this as a time killer but once I got enough volunteers together (that was harder than I thought) they had a great time. The dancing was mostly clean and usually pretty funny. One kid threw down with some nice Robot action and a couple of the girls did a waltz step together with the Polka. If you want to get an idea about the overall spectrum of music then you can listen to it. Dance Mix



Sadly we didn't get to do this. Seriously I'm very sad but there was a miss communication about the fake fish and they were not available for this game.



Ok I got really lucky twice with this game. We got two volunteers which was good since the first callee couldn't hear and so kept going through "I can't hear you" over and over. Total bust but the 2nd caller was ready to go. Then I made a big mistake and made my embarrassing question "what kind of underwear are you wearing?" I should have made the question "boxers or briefs?" That would have been much safer since the callee was a teen girl. Can you imagine how bad it would have been with the various kinds of underwear she could have been wearing and a bunch of teen boys listening in on the answer. Fortunately the answer was "boxers." Yeah I'm so blessed that didn't go down hill quickly.



This was the second most popular game of the evening. Let me say that it was a huge mess and I learned a couple of really important things. First, those cheep table clothes are great. They are cheep and keep most of the mess of the carpet. You can pull them into a nice bundle and drop the in the garbage when you are done. Now for the game, I let the ice cream sit out for a couple hours so it was very melty. Not completely melted since it was in a good size sealed container but easy to spoon out large drippy quantities of ice cream and aim for the mouth, which is easier said than done. The other consideration is that the chocolate syrup is easier to get in the mouth but that too much is a very bad thing. I got worried for a brief moment before I stopped the person applying syrup that they were gonna kill our volunteer. Finally, I learned that you do not give a jar of cherries to the person dropping the cherries. The first couple of tries were fine but then they poured the juice and that was not cool. Still, everyone had a blast with this game and it has the advantage of being something I can do more often than Walking on Goldfish.

Once again I ask if anyone has had experience with these game or other fun games you would like to suggest? I have about 70 game on file right now but I've gone through a great number of them so I really could use more ideas.

Labels: games