Rick Gebauer
Rick is the High School Pastor at Highland Park Church in Lakeland, FL. He is married to an impossibly beautiful woman named Kelley and has 2 mind-numbingly fantastic children named Aidan and Kya. He loves Jesus and teenagers ... so the job seems to suit him pretty well. He is worth Jesus to God and wants you to know that you are too.
Amoeba Tag is Jesus' Favorite Game.
- By Rick Gebauer
- Published 09/25/2008
If you have worked with teens at any point in the last 20 years, you are probably familiar with the game Amoeba Tag (AT). I was first introduced to AT when I was in the High School youth group at the First Baptist Church in my hometown. Our Youth Pastor, Tandy, had us stand inside a boundary line defined by little orange cones arranged in a square. She then rattled off the rules.
• One person starts as "It".
• "It" has to tag another person.
• The crowd has to avoid being tagged by "It", but cannot go outside the cone boundary.
• When a person has been tagged, you must lock arms and attempt to tag others. Each tagged person locks arms with the rest who have been tagged until everyone is "It."
• The game ends when everyone is on the same side.
We must have played AT a dozen times that hot dusty evening...we never got sick of it and it remained a staple for our group for as long as I could remember. I love playing Amoeba Tag! I think as a Youth Pastor, its principles resonate deep within me.
Traditional Tag (TT...no jokes please) emphasizes the notion of transferring our “It-edness” to someone else in the attempt to free us to join the crowd. It is a game of exclusion in its fundamental understanding. The athletic kids excel, the slower kids fail. Individual effort is the key. TT is the world. TT is every person for them. TT is religion.
AT is a game of inclusion. AT contains all of the basic ingredients that make for an awesome game. It promotes constant movement. It has clearly defined rules that are simple to explain. There is no mess to cleanup afterward. And most importantly, it has the most spiritually applicable premise of perhaps any game I can think of.
The game ends when everyone is on the same side.
Put another way; you must lose in order for everyone to win. Isn't that really the reason why we do what we do? Don't we live with the hope that one day, our groups will be more concerned with getting everyone on the same side than we will be with who has the biggest youth room or the most kids on Wednesday Nights or the most successful small group format? Weren’t we called into this for more than our programs? I ask these questions of myself…no stones to be thrown from this direction I can assure you.
Isn't Amoeba Tag the point of it all?
One aspect of God's character that baffles me utterly is the notion that He chases us. Somehow, we have an intimate, intrinsic value to the God we serve. That value is so beyond our capacity to understand that we can only marvel at its nature...namely that:
We are worth Jesus to God.
Let that marinate in your heart for a second. (That sound is your mind being blown)
If that were the end of the story, we could join the Jesus Movement and coast towards eternity. But here is the other side of the coin. We have an opportunity to help the rest of world discover something that only the Truth of Jesus can reveal. The world can know that:
They are worth Jesus to God too.
God captures our hearts with the knowledge of His great love for us. We lose the sin that prohibits life from being lived and thereby win. Then He desires to lock arms with us to capture the hearts and minds of the rest of his kids. He wants all of them. He wants us to want all of them.
Could it be that easy?
Could the point of our ministry and more importantly our lives be about Amoeba Tag? It’s surely more complex than that. Or is it?
The game ends when everyone is on the same side.
Not us vs. them.
Not even them and us.
But rather, the way God see us all…His.
Rick G
• One person starts as "It".
• "It" has to tag another person.
• The crowd has to avoid being tagged by "It", but cannot go outside the cone boundary.
• When a person has been tagged, you must lock arms and attempt to tag others. Each tagged person locks arms with the rest who have been tagged until everyone is "It."
• The game ends when everyone is on the same side.
We must have played AT a dozen times that hot dusty evening...we never got sick of it and it remained a staple for our group for as long as I could remember. I love playing Amoeba Tag! I think as a Youth Pastor, its principles resonate deep within me.
Traditional Tag (TT...no jokes please) emphasizes the notion of transferring our “It-edness” to someone else in the attempt to free us to join the crowd. It is a game of exclusion in its fundamental understanding. The athletic kids excel, the slower kids fail. Individual effort is the key. TT is the world. TT is every person for them. TT is religion.
AT is a game of inclusion. AT contains all of the basic ingredients that make for an awesome game. It promotes constant movement. It has clearly defined rules that are simple to explain. There is no mess to cleanup afterward. And most importantly, it has the most spiritually applicable premise of perhaps any game I can think of.
The game ends when everyone is on the same side.
Put another way; you must lose in order for everyone to win. Isn't that really the reason why we do what we do? Don't we live with the hope that one day, our groups will be more concerned with getting everyone on the same side than we will be with who has the biggest youth room or the most kids on Wednesday Nights or the most successful small group format? Weren’t we called into this for more than our programs? I ask these questions of myself…no stones to be thrown from this direction I can assure you.
Isn't Amoeba Tag the point of it all?
One aspect of God's character that baffles me utterly is the notion that He chases us. Somehow, we have an intimate, intrinsic value to the God we serve. That value is so beyond our capacity to understand that we can only marvel at its nature...namely that:
We are worth Jesus to God.
Let that marinate in your heart for a second. (That sound is your mind being blown)
If that were the end of the story, we could join the Jesus Movement and coast towards eternity. But here is the other side of the coin. We have an opportunity to help the rest of world discover something that only the Truth of Jesus can reveal. The world can know that:
They are worth Jesus to God too.
God captures our hearts with the knowledge of His great love for us. We lose the sin that prohibits life from being lived and thereby win. Then He desires to lock arms with us to capture the hearts and minds of the rest of his kids. He wants all of them. He wants us to want all of them.
Could it be that easy?
Could the point of our ministry and more importantly our lives be about Amoeba Tag? It’s surely more complex than that. Or is it?
The game ends when everyone is on the same side.
Not us vs. them.
Not even them and us.
But rather, the way God see us all…His.
Rick G
