8. Lock-Ins

I have been at my current church for less than a year now. A few months ago I responded to several requests for a lock-in with an affirmative response. I was trying to gain some cool points with the teenagers and I thought it would be a way to move the relationship building part of the job into warp speed.

I made this statement to them, "I will do a lock-in once, if you invite friends and people show up then we might do it again." They rose to that challenge and my sleep cycle has never been the same since. We planned for 40 students (this is where you compare your youth group in size to mine... blog post on that topic tomorrow) and in the mass chaos of the events that transpired we were only able to count heads and ended up with 98 people. We had to re-plan everything in 5 minutes.

So this past weekend was my second endeavor into the world of overnight torture and we borrowed a second bus, giving us room for 80 students. But to be honest with you, I thought we would regress back to 50 or so. This past weekend we had 104 students and so we still had to re-plan everything in five minutes. But the gospel was presented, lives were changed, and some students that have never stepped foot in a church before showed up and put 13 hours in at one.

Here are some observations from our lock-in:

1. When you are dealing with unchurched kids, don't leave your cell phone lying around. One of our adults made this mistake and it took us 9 hours before we got any intell on who the culprit was. Turns out it was a kid who left "sick" at 3 in the morning. He was real sick when we showed up at his house to retrieve the missing Droid, waking up his mom in the process.

2. People will always complain about the state the church was left in after the fact... always. We have a giant sanctuary building with a lot of surrounding rooms and our college students led the biggest game of Underground Church in the history of Middle Georgia. I was very nervous about what could be broken and what ramifications this game could have on my job security and overall reputation in my church. At 4 in the morning, the game fizzled out and my team worked very hard to get the church back as we found it. (Including cleaning up after someone who thought you were supposed to pee next to the toilet) And yet the next day there were rumblings that people were upset because a tablecloth was moved and a bracelet with a skull on it was found on the floor... people will always complain.

3. McDonald's is an awkward place. We had selected four fast food restaurants that the kids could sign up for on a first come, first serve basis. So the kids who are regulars knew this and all signed up to go to the popular places, leaving me and half a bus full of strangers to eat at McDonald's. This is cool because I had the chance to get to know students I had never met before. This is uncool because I had no idea what to talk about. Once the first french fry went in the air and the "Respect the youth pastor" death stare didn't work, I knew it was time to get out of there. We should have went to Chick-Fil-A. Taking that group to the Kiss-In should have been a lot of fun. :)

Do you have any lock-in stories?

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