My Experience as Youth Pastor

Another game night and more adults complaining, I'm doing pretty good. I learned a few things tonight so allow me to elucidate. Did I use that word correctly?

First, I learned that Youth love meeting outside.

I've tried this in the past just once. The youth have been begging me the past few weeks but I've avoided it for the simple reason that I get distrac … hey look a chicken … too easily. I was really bad last time. I'm trying to preach and every time a car went by or some dog ran past I was lost. Since tonight was game night I went outside. I wanted to play games outside last month but it went from really nice to very rainy on the night. Same thing was shaped up for tonight but God cleared the rain for us. Honestly it had been raining for 3 days and was predicted to be raining tonight. There was a line of rain that broke up before reaching us so we setup outside.

I used our portable sound system and played music through an MP3 player and put my wireless on it. I had 3 games and I decided I should have done the first game last because it was the most fun, but I'll talk about that later.

Then I learned that Adults don't like music.

OK they do like music but not what the Youth like. I also learned that I should face the speakers away from the main sanctuary. We had a lot of people complaining about the music, both the loudness and the choice.

Honestly I'm not too concerned. Next time I plan on arranging my speakers differently but I'm not going to let their complaints slow e down that much. At this point there are more students there on Wednesday nights than there are adults. They can get over it.

Second I learned that Youth love playing sports.

Yeah ok I already knew this but I needed to setup the next complaint. We have skate boarders and I get complaints every week. We have checked with our insurance and they can skate but not as a church sponsored event and so we can't have any elements. If we have an organized skate activity or provide/allow skate elements (ramps and things like that) then we have to have special insurance. We also have basketball and a football to throw around. This has been very popular with the Youth and tonight they got to spend pretty much the whole night doing it so that was great as far as they were concerned.

Then I learned that Adults don't like it when kids are having fun.

Yeah I said it. Girls may in fact wanna have fun but when people reach a certain age they feel it is their responsibility to stop it. Not everyone, in fact probably not even a majority, but the q-tips (think about it for a minute) that complain are very loud. I think it's because they are hard of hearing. Of course that doesn't explain why they complain about the noise of our music but whatever.

Seriously though, we had complaints about the skate boarding (which is a weekly occurrence) and about the football and basket ball tonight. Honestly, this is the first time they complained about the football and basketball. At some point I think they are just looking for reasons to be upset.

Third, I learned that Youth love water balloons.

Ok, if there is a game we have played that went over better I don't know it. We played three games tonight. They were all pretty fun but the first game was the best.

The second game was the grab bag relay. Now people in this group aren't quite as competitive as I was/am. They didn't seems to try and scarf the food as quickly as I did when I played this game in Youth. I was even nice and gave them cold Coke, Oreo cookies, Doritos, and Laffy Taffy. It was fun but the teens didn't really try to go that fast so the game took too long.

The third game was an Oreo eat off. Basically I had 4 players that had to eat 6 Oreos by opening them and licking the filling then eating the cookie. These were blue double stuffed and again it was fun but they were just moving along kinda slow. I was expecting this so we played a Flyleaf song and they had till the end of the song to win. If no one finished in the time then the person who had eaten the most would be the winner. We did get a winner just before the song ended but I should have picked a shorter song. 2.5 minutes was just too long. Seriously you would think teens would be able to eat Oreos faster than that.

Then I learned that Youth love water balloons.

Ok this isn't about adults except that it is about how I made the mistake of doing the best game first. I brought out a dozen water balloons and I was rushed by students before I even asked for volunteers. I told them I needed 8 volunteers and had to send people away. Honestly that is a first. I lined my 8 up and then sent them to get a partner from the crowd. Then each group was given a water balloon to toss back and forth. After each toss the group had to move back. I moved the groups slowly at first then made a couple of big moves and eliminated most of the Youth. In the end two teams broke their balloons on the same toss but I had extras for this possibility. I gave them another shot and one team caught theirs and won a Monster each. The second place team got the consolation prize of getting to throw the two remaining balloons into the crowd.

The other two games were a bit anticlimactic after that. Of course if some of the adults saw the game I'm sure they would have complained. This falls under the second "then I learned" category.

Oh well, some people are made to complain I guess. I just feel like if a person has time to complain they have time to be doing something that will make others complain. Frigin retards.