Canyon Community Church of the Nazarene, part #2

Things started going really, really good with the youth group. As I said we started small and then we started to grow. I don't like focusing on numbers, but it was nice to see growth. Not numeric so much as spiritual growth. People wanting to be at church, bringing their Bibles, asking questions, engaging as a group. 

We started doing more stuff. In addition to the "regular" times, the teens would hang out after church and we'd get some lunch. At first it was a once a month thing, or at least thats kind of what I planned, but it turned into a week thing. We'd all walk over as a group to one of the local fast food joints and order our food to take with us back to the church. We'd eat in the library and everyone one would talk about school and home stuff. I tried to encourage parents to follow our example and do lunch together, but most tried it as "free babysitting" and got some errands done.

We also did "Allnighters". To kick things off with our first Allnighter, I wanted to make a Mega-Allnighter. From 8:00pm Friday until 5:00pm Saturday. It was brutal. I planned a high energy night followed by a beach trip the next day with NO sleep in between. Everyone had a good time. Lunch time on Saturday was a little different. We didnt make it to the beach. Instead we went swimming in Pastor Art's pool. Nobody was swimming. It was more like teen zombies standing in water. I asked if anybody was hungry. People just answered with grunts. I put a hotdog in this girls hand and she just started at it. I told her,"Its a hot..dog. You can ...eat it. Its okay. She stared at it some more and then started eating it. Like I said , it was brutal. A big mistake, but everyone survived. At first, we planned on doing one or two a year. The longer we were at the church ,it seemed like it was once every two or three months. A typical Allnighter would start on Friday around 9:00pm and end around 7:00am on the following Saturday. We would plan different things to be done at the church and a couple of other places. We always had a few extra visitors. We usually started off with a get to know everybody game. You know the usual stuff like Chubby Bunny, Trainwreck, and other fast paced games. Then a pizza feast. We followed it up with Cosmic Bowling. The biggest adventure of the night was transportation. This was always a problem. I am thankful to the many people who drove when we did the midnight Cosmic Bowling. Usually it was me driving my Corolla and a parent driving a minivan. First, we go from Corona to the bowling alley in Norco and drop off an adult to stay with the first wave of teens. We also left an adult( usually Jen) at the church until the last wave. After much shuttling, we'd get everybody there. This usually started around 10:30pm and bowling started at midnight and the final group would get back to the church around 1:00am. Bowling was always great fun. Some of the teens were so go at bowling, they used two balls at time! Others like to use the "softball method". This is lobbing the ball underhand like a softball down the lane until gravity pulled it back down to earth or in this case the freshly waxed hardwood lane. Another highlight of Cosmic Bowling would be the music video time. Most of the teens were bowling and were oblivious to the music and the videos. Every time we went, the bowling alley would show Sir Mix A Lot's "Baby got back". The video is very bad and suggestive, but no one really noticed until an adult helper got upset and started yelling. "DO YOU SEE THAT?!?!" she said to me and Jen pointing at the very large screens hanging from the ceiling. "DON'T THEY KNOW WE'RE A CHURCH GROUP. DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY'RE SHOWING?" At this point, ALL my boys stopped bowling and were transfixed on what was in front of them. The lady walked up to the counter and gave the man an earful which the whole bowling alley could hear. I just told everybody to get back to bowling and ignore the screens. They went back to bowling.

When we got back to the church, we usually played sardines, did more wacky games, and other stuff. EVERYBODY had a great time. Later, we stopped going bowling and just did stuff at the church. It was cheaper and in some ways a lot more fun. In the middle of the activities, we had a wind down time. I usually taught a very short and brief devotional. Visitors always expressed that they never knew church could be fun.

We kept everyone going and going the whole time. A few people would crash out around 4am, but it was more like a nap. Good times. Other than the time a girl got a black eye playing steal the bacon and a couple of minor mishaps, it was good times. We were building memories.