Post Famine Thoughts
I’m still processing through my thoughts and reactions to the 30 Hour Famine. At present, I feel like it was neither exactly what I had hoped nor exactly what I had feared. On the positive side, I was able to speak with several students and get to know them better than I did before. This is always a huge win in my book, since I think that relationships are the basis for, well, life. We also had plenty of fun and good times as we chatted, played video games, learned card games and otherwise just enjoyed one another’s company.
The spiritual aspects of the event, however, were completely lost on the students. At least, I feel like they were. I’ve done youth ministry long enough to know that most likely one or two students picked up on a couple of things. This is the most disappointing aspect of the event for me. I attempted to set a rhythm of prayer every couple hours. The idea was we would gather, share a little, pray, and spend a few moments just being with God. This didn’t work out. Perhaps I was too idealistic in my expectations (always a possibility). Perhaps the students just completely weren’t into it. Perhaps God had other plans. Whatever the reason, the students didn’t pray, didn’t express a desire to pray, and these times ended up being me and one or two of the other leaders praying for a couple minutes until we released the students back to their “festivities.”
So, the famine succeeded in raising some money (though less than I might have hoped) and in allowing all of us some time to just raise awareness, have fun together, hang out, and otherwise be a community. It, unfortunately, lacked the spiritual emphasis for which I had hoped. It is times like this when I wonder if rethinking youth ministry, trying to do things differently, is really worth it. I could run this youth ministry as a typical evangelical youth ministry, and we would have easily triple the number of students we have now, in just a couple months. We’d have high energy events. I might even pick up a few “Jesus Freak” students who are “on fire for Jesus.” Yet I know, that at least in my experience, such things don’t work. They are shallow. Still, it’s difficult to run a youth ministry differently. Perhaps I need to let me thoughts coagulate for a day or two and devote a post to this topic.
been there, done that (with the famine and with other events). keep plugging to rethink and rework youth ministry.
Thanks for your honest thoughts, Calvin. We are getting ready to do the 30 Hour Famine in my youth group. I haven’t done one in years. I think you are right on the money that sometimes the best you can hope for is that a few kids will walk away really impacted by the event. Still, we really can’t know the impact we are having –neither can the youth. Many won’t know until years later what it meant for them to spend a night focused on hunger rather than hanging out at the mall. At least in your efforts to develop a prayer practice and focus on the needs of others you are painting a picture for them of an alternate way to be in the world. The toughest part of youth ministry, for my money, is that the real impact you are having will likely come when these kids are adults, and you won’t be around to see it! I guess this is where the faith part comes in.
[...] books like Contemplative Youth Ministry only serve to reinforce my thinking. But, as I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I am sometimes left wondering if the whole process of rethinking youth ministry is worth [...]