Young Life and Me

I just (truly, about 15 minutes ago) got back from a Young Life fundraising dinner. For those of you who don't know, Young Life is a large group whose purpose is to bring young people to God. Pretty much the same thing we try to do every Sunday at G3 meetings. It was actually a pretty interesting dinner. I got an idea for what they do on their weekly meetings, which hare strangely similar to our G3 meetings as well. They play a game of some sort, a community building game (popping balloon between two people without using your hands), a skit (we had one with a woman who didn't know how to be creative, another with two people spraying each-other with whipped cream). Then they have a talk about God.

Two things struck me about this. They have a great staff and a ton of youth attending. It makes me wonder what we're trying to do the same thing at G3. Why is it (and I'll be asking this of the group) that our youth want to come to G3 instead of attending Young Life or another church (Christian Fellowship, McLean Bible, etc...)?

The other thing which got my attention was that the games they played are things we've tried as well. But for us people just don't seem as interested (though I will be trying them tomorrow night to see for sure).

This leads me to really want to figure out what Young Life does so well to bring youth to Christ (they have 700,000 members worldwide) which we could be doing better. But then, maybe it's the relatively small size of our youth group that people like. Though I don't completely believe that. If you have comments I'd love to hear them. I'll also be looking into this a but more myself.

Well, tonight I leave you with this quote from JoA which we watched last G3:

Romance serves a purpose. It's a meditative state. It puts logic to sleep so that people can come together. Otherwise you probably wouldn't risk it... Love is big. It's a bright light in the universe. And a bright light casts a big shadow.

How awesome is that?

Peace.

posted by Tom at 7:46 PM