theSWITCH in Review: #1

This is the first edition of 'theSWITCH in Review'.  A new weekly post that will, you guessed it, review what happened at that week's youth ministry gathering.

I unabashedly stole this idea from Josh Griffin, who is cool and lets me steal his ideas all the time.  You can read all about his ministry as an awesome youth pastor here.

I decided to post these reviews, not as a way to brag or show off what we do, but as a way to give others some ideas, to show people what actually goes on at theSWITCH, and to encourage other youth workers to share their thoughts on what we/they do (how we can improve what we do, what new things might we try, what works well for them, etc.)  I would love for these posts to become conversation starters about what people around the country are doing in the ministries they serve in.

So without further ado, here is theSWITCH in Review:

Activity:

We played a game I invented called Chuck it!  It involves chucking tennis balls a good 60-70 yards and trying to get them in 5 gallon buckets held by your teammates.

Here are the rules:

teams of 6.

1 team up to chuck at a time.

Each team has 2 outfielders, equipped with 1 bucket each and a mean desire to catch tennis balls.

The remaining (4) teammates each get 2 chances to chuck the tennis ball.

After all four chuckers have chucked, the next team is up.

Each round you must put 2 new outfielders in the field. (this way everyone gets to catch and chuck)

A caught ball equals 1 point.

The team with the most points at the end of 3 rounds wins.

Equipment necessary:

2 5 gallon buckets (you might want extras, we blew a hole in the bottom of one...apparently tennis balls can do some damage at high speed.)

tennis balls (we had 15, just in case we lost some and also to keep the game pace up.  You don't want to wait for each ball to be thrown back in before the next person chucks.)

1 chuck it dog toy ($10 from walmart.  You see how uncreative I am, I named the game after the dog toy...probably copyright infringement but hopefully not!)

Here's a video of the game in action:

(Coming tomorrow, Vimeo is super slow right now, sorry.)

Bible lesson:

We did an adapted version of the first lesson in 'Confident Christian' by Greg Stier.  The premise of the of the lesson is to address the belief that 'If I'm a good enough person I'll go to heaven.'  This is obviously not what the Bible teaches but it is a prevalent belief in society.  We discussed the works based salvation of other religions and how that differs from the free gift of salvation we have in Christ.

All in all, it was a fun lesson and I believe there were a few students who came to the realization that not everyone will be in heaven.  What an opportunity to reinforce to them the importance of sharing the Gospel with those that have not yet believed!

Total Time:

2 hours.  (Side note: we did not worship through music this week, both Chuck it! and the lesson went long.)

Leave a comment: What positive thing happened this week at the youth ministry you serve in?