What NOT to do at a youth lock-in

Now that the hubbub has died down, I have had plenty of time to reflect on our November Youth Lock-In and what we'll do better and differently next year.

What we did this year:

1. We did a twenty-four hour lock-in. Five p.m. on Friday to five p.m. on Saturday.

2. The theme was "Survival Basics", and we split the youth into two survivor teams who competed for points in various games and tasks. The winning team will get to go to a Kings game sometime in January. We has basic workshops like how to study the Bible and what prayer is.

3. We offered a large amount of points if a youth did a personal Bible study on their own personal free time. Most of the youth did them.

What we will do differently next year:

1. The lock-in will last from 9 p.m. on Friday night until 8 a.m Saturday with no time allotted for sleeping. Trying to get the youth to sleep at this lock in was futile and we still had to deal with 10 extremely grumpy teens all day Saturday (along with 4 tired and irritable youth pastors/leaders). Better to keep them up all night and then send them home to sleep all day.

2. Budget better. We were quite a bit over budget this year, but as I have the youth group up now on quickbooks (nonprofit edition), next year looks to be much better. Plus, if we only have the youth for twelve hours, it will cut down on the amount of food needed for the lock in.

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Actually, this lock-in went extremely well, all things considered. The youth showed up, we spent some time in our groups making posters and doing a couple ice breaker games. We had free time, a couple games, and the Basics of Bible Study Workshop. All Friday night. We tried to have lights-out by 1:30. It worked for the girls, they were conked out by midnight, practically. The boys were quite a different story though. We had to intervene a few times, eventually taking some points away from the groups. I think I finally snapped and took points away at 3:45 am. Considering that we were making breakfast for the men's bible study that meets at 7 am, sleep came sparingly that night.

I also suppose that the fact that women who are 7 months pregnant really aren't made to sleep on bean bags on hard floors. Or go on that small amount of sleep. It took me a couple days to recover. But recover I did, and now I can blog about it.

The breakfast went well. We has the youth serve and cook, and I handed out rating cards to each man, and the reviews were very positive.

The games all went swimmingly. The big winner, by far, was toilet paper dodge-ball. I think it was the first time our church sanctuary floor was covered (two inches deep) in unraveled toilet paper. But everyone had a ball. It turns out that throwing toilet paper rolls at each other is good stress relief and more fun than you think. For now, in the open source / creative commons spirit, here are the games, schedule, and curriculum for the lock-in.

Game -Backwards Compatible
Game - Captionize Me
Game - Chairball
Game - TP Dodgeball

Lock-In Schedule (excel)

Workshop - The Basics of Bible Study
Workshop - The Basics of Prayer
Workshop - The Basics of Sin & Redemption

So, feel free to read, download, use, remix, whatever. They are certainly not copyrighted, and they are very basic. But the youth connected pretty well with the workshops, and it seemed really to their level of understanding (hence the "basic" part). We did end up scrubbing the sin and redemption mural, though. They were so grumpy by the end that we thought introducing paint was just a recipe for disaster. We'll do that one some other time.

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Coming up: Starting Nov. 30th, I'll be posting a 4 week devotional series for Advent. One post per week, so stay tuned.