When I was new to youth ministry, I was desperate for guidance. Clueless as to how to fill up a two-hour time slot with 12 rowdy teens, I spoke to some veterans in the youth ministry field. They suggested I run each Friday night youth gathering as a “big event with lots of fun activities.” These activities would grow a crowd that could be funneled into something more serious. Sounded like a good plan to me.
The next few weeks were exactly that: Full of activities designed to attract a crowd and excite teenagers. We smacked each other with newspapers, spat water into a bucket, and stomped balloons tied to each other’s feet. Suddenly we hit week six—that’s when the wheels came off.
The week we played “buns charades.”
If you don’t know this game, I urge you not to investigate further—I’m fairly sure it’s illegal in several states. The game is based on charades. But (no pun intended) the “twist” is that you wiggle your backside to spell words. To my naïve, simple mind this seemed like a great idea. However, one of the players was an attractive 16-year-old girl trying to spell the word boat.
Soon I realized that most of the boys in the group had caught onto the word straightaway; except they were enjoying this girl’s buns charade so much that they were shouting out, “Elephant! Automobile! Bicycle!”—anything to keep the game going.
I watched this and realized that for them this was the perfect Friday night: Hang out with the opposite sex while the youth leader runs an activity that gets an attractive girl onstage wiggling her rear end. I stood there in utter dismay. This is not what I’d hoped for. I left that night with the sad realization that I needed to revisit my original commitment to the “event” as the way forward in youth ministry.
Years later I’m an even more diehard event skeptic. I feel like one of those “last men standing” in a Quentin Tarantino film as I step over the corpses of youth events over the last two decades.
I’ve seen so many things come and go, so many new gimmicks that promise to bring great rewards to my youth group. A few years back I read an ad promising the “next big thing to really transform my next youth event.” It was, believe it or not, Christian Karaoke.
Are you kidding me? Now I’m all for Christian music, but having a big event where my students sing karaoke to Toby Mac really isn’t going to transform my kids, group, or community.
Just a year ago a group came to Vancouver promising monthly events that would “blow our minds and reach the youth of this great city.” It promised rock bands (not just one or two, but three groups that would rock for Christ), an indoor climbing wall, wild games, and I think there was something about a man ripping a phone book in half (I may have my events mixed here, but you get the picture). This program lasted two months before the organizers either realized that not only were they having no impact, but they also were going broke at the same time.
Yes, I’m an event skeptic. Why am I so skeptical? Well, there are a number of reasons.

Events Presuppose Two Things That Aren’t True

1. I need to import fun into my Christian gathering.
2. Non-Christians won’t come to my youth group unless there’s something fun for them to come to.

These two statements just aren’t true in my experience. The kids in my youth group love coming to our gathering week after week. We have a great time learning about Christianity and helping each other grow in the faith. In fact, the gathering is so good that parents often use it as a means of discipline if their child misbehaves (“If you stay out too late you won’t be allowed to go to youth group this week”!).
Similarly, new people come to our group not because we have light shows and rock stars, but because their friends invited them to experience how fun it can be to hang with Christians.
One day we moved our youth group meeting to a new hall. As this was a special “event,” I decided to run one of those things I call a “meaningless activity.” You take off your shoes, throw them into a pile, and your partner has to find your shoes for you. We had a large number of kids there so the pile of shoes was enormous.
At the end of the evening three eleventh-grade girls said, “Can we meet with you this week to talk?” Later that week we met, and they sat me down and said they were afraid that “youth group is losing its edge and becoming like the other dumb groups who play stupid games. We come to sing and pray and hear about God. We come to grow in our faith and not run around looking for shoes. If you start running stupid games, we don’t think we can invite our friends anymore.”
I was overjoyed and rebuked at the same time. These young women gave me the message loud and clear.