Our Youth Meeting

This past year has been a crazy time for our youth group. In the past several months we have had our youth leader. We have a couple who have taken it over. We have had several youth leave (unrelated to the youth leaders), and just have had lots of changes. To be honest I sense more discouragement than encouragement lately, I think a big blow was when we decided not to go to San Antonio for the International Youth Convention.

These past few weeks Trevor and Jessica (the new leaders) have been setting up the stage for change. Most people think you should wait for change but in this case change is a well needed feature. We still have pictures of the old youth pastor (which has been gone for almost 2 1/2 years) and old youth hanging up. Its been a while since our youth room has been "updated". Yesterdays task was talking about a new name for our youth group. The previous name was RDE (Reach, Disciple, Encourage) and really we haven't used that name to describe us since I have been a part of the youth program. After discussing what the youth group "stood" for, we left the youth to themselves to come up with scripture and possible names.

The counselors went to the fellowship hall and chatted coming up with our own names. My suggestion was F.A.R.T. (sorry I can't remember what the letters stood for but they DID stand for something). I even had a great t-shirt idea, a cow with its tale up, inside the shirt would be a button in which the cow would fart and spray out green gas. That idea was shot down pretty fast.

ANYWAY back to the youth:
After about 1/2 hour of deliberation they had decided on two verses but no name. They are hoping to get time next week to discuss a name. The youth seem really excited about this, it would be good to use this excitement to get things rolling as we start our first community event.

After Youth (The Youth Counselor Meeting):
We had our 3rd Counselor meeting since Trevor and Jessica (Now Called Tressica). The main focus was a community event we are planning for the end of May. We are hoping to have an on site event for an out of school celebration and invite the surrounding community and friends of the youth that attend. We are trying a couple of things to get a response, one being a xbox 360 giveaway (a Nintendo Wii was suggested but I thought an xbox is more popular with the middle/high school age group). We also will get some inflatables for some fun activities (Joist baby YEAH). We really didn't get to much further than that but its a good start but unfortunately time is a HUGE factor.

We will probably have some more meetings but I would like to come up with some ideas that might help move these meetings into direction. So I am asking, "What would you suggest would be a good attraction to bring in youth from the community?" What's worked for you? What have you done to tell the youth in the community whats going on AFTER the event has taken place?