Our church has a great youth group (because we have a great youth leader!) that my kids love. Each year some of the youth help with VBS in Rec and Music and anywhere else help is needed, but mainly those two places. Toby, our youth director, is in charge of Rec, and there's no telling what he'll come up with! Here's a picture of my younger daughter running the obstacle course they set up...
A couple of the days the noise from the teens playing the games AFTER the little kids were done drew us out of the kitchen to see the fun. Here's one they always like.
The youth room is FOR youth and we're bursting at the seams. They do some of the craziest stuff over there, but it almost always ties in with the message and ends up packing a punch. In the summer they do extra things since the kids have so much free time.
This summer the youth department has a Disney theme going and Toby is using some Disney movies as spring boards for his Wednesday night messages.
To go along with the theme, his wife Becky is decorating the youth room and she's doing a fantastic job! Kim and the college kids are helping, as well as a few others, when they can. My oldest has been able to lend his building skills a couple of times...
Here they're building Pride Rock for Lion King. The brown stuff is quilt batting we spray painted for last year's VBS to make an Australian sand dune. This summer it's a rock. ;-)
Some of the other movies they've used so far this summer are Pirates 1-- the Curse of the Black Pearl, Snow White, Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast. For Snow White's week, they bobbed for apples. This week, for Beauty and the Beast, they dolled up 4 guys with make up, nail polish, hair glitter and skirts and cardigans.Those guys were... beautiful. LoL or something. It was a race and the contestants were painstakingly chosen-- through Rock, Paper, Scissors --and the winner won a prize. Having fun in the youth room is serious business. Because their souls and their personal walk with Jesus is serious business!
I was able to hear Toby's message that went with Pirates and it was excellent. I know Disney didn't intend to put such great parallels into their movies, but they're there and if you look you can find a Christian message in them. What a GREAT jumping off point for a conversation!
We're all shipwrecked pirates on a ship that's sinking fast--pirates at odds with the King! Satan mans the Black Pearl, searching for his treasure which calls out to him... Just like the moonlight exposed the pirates for what they were, the walking dead, it exposes us for what we really are, either the walking dead or the living, those alive in Christ. And don't forget the blood that was needed to stop the curse! In order to live, we need blood, too.
How far are you willing to go rescue those in the pirate's grasp?
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That is sooooooooooo cool!
ReplyDeleteMy high school youth group was an awesome time for me. That was during the '70's when "Jesus Freaks" were cool. A lot of good memories (some not so good, too)
This looks SO awesome. Powerful stuff, I know. Dunno about our youth group yet, but I hope it has this kind of energy and passion (at least by the time my kids are that age. Selfish, eh? LOL)
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