For the past couple of years I have been trying to figure out a way to bridge the gap between our older, more mature adults in the church and our youth. At our church the adults tend to come more on Sundays and the youth more on Wednesday nights. I have tried to get some of the adults to play a more vital role in the youth ministry and some have jumped in like gangbusters. Others have stayed on the fringe like they are a 5 year old scared to jump off the diving board.
We have been talking about fellowship and mentorship for the past few months as a staff. In fact, May is our fellowship focus for the Sunday School time as each class will be learning about fellowship and thinking of ways to incorporate it into the life of the church and community. The high school Sunday school teacher came to me with this idea and it was awesome. A Wii Bowling Pro/Am where the students are the pros and they are partnered with an adult as the amateur. This is a great way to foster some conversations between the student and adult, to build teamwork, and to hopefully build a relationship that will last a lifetime.
So, here is what we did…
I pitched this idea to the adult first and got about 20 of them to commit to being apart of this fellowship/fundraiser for camp. Then I paired a student that was going to camp with an adult. I did the pairings so that I could be very intentional teams that were being formed. I gave each of them a pledge sheet to collect money to offset the cost of camp (similar to Big Brothers/Big Sister Bowl-A-Thon).
The day of the big event we set up 5 TVs each with a Wii. We provided lunch for all participants and I assigned 2 teams to each TV and they played 3 games. We took the highest score of the 3 games for that individual and used that for the donation per pin figure and also to determine the winners of the prizes. It was very encouraging to see the youth and adults interact in ways they never did before. We are going to make this an annual event and may do a winter event as a golf scramble. It should be a lot of fun.
Things I learned and would do differently next time…
• Big Screen TVs – Go to a rent a center and rent several big screen TVs for the weekend
• Alternate games – Don’t have the teams play all three games in a row if you have other teams waiting to play.
• Inform players of time commitment – granted we didn’t know it would take 3 ½ hours, but we should have expected it to take longer than we thought.
• Provide childcare for those grandparents that bring their little ones.
