My Experience as Youth Pastor

Wow, this weekend was an absolute blur. It really was great though. Early Saturday morning I wrote about things that happened on Friday night so I won't rehash those details. I will give a bit of info on the lead up and Saturday.

This was an event that 3 different church ministries worked together on from our area. We ended up getting 125 tickets, 30 for us, for $20 each instead of nearly $50 so right off the bat God was blessing this venture. I brought 31 people to the event from my church. That was much better than last year. The frustration was that I had 5 people drop on me one week before the event but then I had 7 people want to get added in. What's that? How did I end up with 31? Well it's simple really. I had 30 spots all of which were filled until just before the event then 5 people dropped on my. I had several people who had been asking about going even though the event was full and I was trying to get them filled from the other ministries but I could only hunt down a couple of tickets. When the 5 dropped I quickly filled that and still had people asking to go. Next year I'm going to be planning on 40-50 from our church. Anyways, that left us with 32 people, but one more had to drop the day of. It is reasonable and I'm not mad at her. One of my adult sponsors had a little girl in the hospital for a couple days before the event. You can't really blame her. I would have understood if my wife didn't come so that's cool. Still we went up with one more person than I originally had tickets for so that is pretty frigintastic and we got the tickets for less than half price which is fan-frigintastic.

Well another cool thing was the lunch on Saturday. We talked about just getting lunch delivered and thought about pizza and Subway before deciding on Chick-Fil-A. We were going to get the sandwhiches for a bit over $2 each so we settled on 150 chicken sandwiches and placed the order with a contact up in Baltimore. A bit later the contact called and said they were donating the lunch so we saved another $300+.

On Saturday things went great but most of the Youth were super crashed. I didn't sleep at all Friday night, and a couple days before I didn't get any sleep either because of a bear visit. I didn't crash till Sunday though. The Youth kept asking how many Monsters I had had and they couldn't understand how I could have more energy than them being older with less sleep even though I had only had one small cup of coffee that morning. What can I say? I think drinking so few Monsters help me to have more energy in general. I got a couple nasty bruises that morning. At one point there was something they were asking Youth Leaders to get up on stage for. I tried to make it up once the Youth got my attention. I was dealing with an issue so I had no idea what was going on. I ran down the stairs vaulting the last 4 feet and then ran towards the stage. A couple ladies were meandering down the aisle side by side and left just a bit of room on either side so I did a nice jump slide across the platform beside them. I almost made it to the stage when they said they didn't need anyone else. I got a monster bruise from that jump slide but it looked really cool and impressed the Youth that were watching me so I guess it was worth it.

Of course earlier that morning they had the first session that was pretty powerful. "The trouble with the opposite sex" was about … yeah you guessed it sex. They broke the group into guys and girls and gave them their own lessons. They did a great job with the guys and I really appreciate one of the things they encouraged the leaders in. They pointed out how good the church is as crucifying people that come in with real struggles instead of the "Christian sins" that we like to ignore. They encouraged the leaders to respond in love and encouraging students who are struggling instead of beating them down. Anyone that knows me at all know this is a real hot button topic for me so I'm very glad that they were able to share that with more than a hundred leaders. In the end they let some students beat a computer monitor with a bat. After that my Youth were asking me about doing that so I guess next time I talk sex with them I'll talk about porn and let them destroy my broken monitor.

They had the parent session after that while they talked about reading the Bible. I wish they had been a little more specific about how to read the Bible though. I like to give my students suggestions on how they can read the Bible and get more from it by asking questions. One of the best ways is to ask 3 questions. What does this passage tell me about God? What does it tell me about myself? What does it tell me about my relationship with God? The encouraged students to read and explained why they should read and told them they need to take it "one bite at a time" but didn't really give them any tools. I think this is the only session where they didn't give the students the tools they needed to succeed. I guess it is acceptable to fall short in one area. They followed this up with a presentation on Compassion which is a child sponsor program.

After that we went to lunch and had our free Chick-Fil-A, chips, and soda that we bought before. I also sold 16 Monsters. The number is pretty important. I felt called to support a child and had the idea that we use our Monster sales to make it happen. I told the students about it and they were all very excited so after we went back in I went down and found a little girl just older than my oldest from Indonesia. I pulled out the cash from Monster sales at lunch and had $32 which was exactly what I needed for one month support. I think that is pretty freakin' cool.

Wow I've already written a lot and have only made it through lunch. Time to wrap it up and write more later.