Build Relationships

I still look back on that first year at the Midwest church with great fondness. So many cool things happened in that time, professionally and personally. Chief among them being the birth of my daughter, my first born. With that we started looking for a home to buy. We were planting roots, and though that brought anxiety, we were excited to be doing that.

Professionally, I worked on something for most of the year that remains one of my proudest “moments” in ministry. On one of my first Wednesday nights with the high school youth, I spent a lot of time talking about the fact that I was from Florida. I could tell this was something about me they were fascinated by. During that night I mentioned that maybe one day we could do a retreat or trip to Florida, and I could “show them around.” By the way they reacted to that idea…visibly & audibly…it felt like I had just told them I had the ability to personally introduce them to the Avengers or something. I made a personal note that night that I maybe needed to start thinking about making that trip happen sooner rather than later.

We went through the last couple months of the school year, and I started to put real thought into this idea. I was still brand new in my eyes. I hadn’t even been at this church for a full school year…and I was contemplating what would be a huge undertaking. A trip that would be 3,000+ miles in total…a trip that I quickly realized if I wanted to do right…I would have to organize everything on our own. This would be a 100% homegrown trip planned out from beginning to end by me. I pitched my idea to Donn our senior pastor. I put together a proposal for him and our entire program staff. I could tell they were nervous for me…but he thought it was a good idea. He said this would be a trip that would give many of our youth an opportunity they would otherwise never get. I was told to go for it.

I made the decision to call this trip the “Build Relationships Retreat.” It was important to me to not just label this as a fun trip to Florida…but also not label it as a mission trip. I wanted the focus of this trip to be from beginning to end about building a strong community together. I wanted the focus to be on building relationships with each other…relationships that would become the solid foundation of our youth group. I wanted us to be a youth group that was truly welcoming to ALL…that didn’t feel cliquey…but felt like a community that genuinely loved and cared for each other. We would foster this through lots of fun, lots of opportunities for bonding, service opportunities, and worship sessions that would expose them to different voices & perspectives.

First, I addressed the logistics of the trip. We had to know where we were going, how we were going to get there, and how we were going to pay for it. I wanted to give them a real Florida adventure. I decided our central base for all of this would be camp. My camp. The same camp that I went to as a youth, that I worked at as a counselor…where God called me to full time ministry and formed me into what I would become. It was close in driving distance to theme parks and Daytona Beach and had lots of opportunities for service & fun right there itself. It was perfect. The decision on how to get there was made clear quickly…I figured out I could make this trip cost less than $400 per kid if we drove…it’d be thousands of dollars if we didn’t. We would end up bringing 18 youth and 5 adults including myself. So, we took our church bus, rented a 12-passenger van, and drove 20+ hours both ways...stopping to stay at a church in Nashville on the way there and back. This kept the price for the youth down. We fundraised like crazy. We sold tickets to a “sponsor dinner” that we would put on for people who supported us financially when we got back. We sold pies, we used scholarship money from our youth fund…and every kid who wanted to go went…and nearly all of them got it paid off through work like this.

I wanted the trip to be about building these relationships…from beginning to end. We set up 2 days for them to spend at Universal Studios with dual park passes and set aside a half day that they’d spend at Daytona Beach. Most of these kids had never been to a theme park like that or seen an ocean…so I knew those experiences would take care of themselves. The camp we stayed at was getting ready for their upcoming summer and training counselors…so I knew there wouldn’t be a shortage of service work we could do while we were there. I reached out to my friends in the state…including Jim from my first internship. I asked them to come and speak to our youth during our worship sessions…each of them brought a unique perspective that I knew our youth hadn’t experienced before. Each of them had a different scripture passage from the relationship of Peter and Jesus to focus on. My goal for our spiritual journey of the retreat was to mirror that relationship…Peter’s journey was always a favorite of mine and it leant to good conversations that I hoped would deepen their faith. All my friends did an incredible job and I felt so humbled to see them come to bat for me like that.

The idea I had that I was most proud of…that worked the best…was what we did on the car ride down to Florida. Every youth trip I had been a part of would have the kids coming back talking about how they felt closer to the people on that trip than they ever had before. How they had spent so much time with each other and made connections they didn’t expect to make. I had found that these connections didn’t seem to come to fruition until the end of the trip…then the kids would just go home. I wanted to try and speed up that process so these kids would not just come home friends…but come home as a true community to build the youth group off of. When we made our first stop for gas…I asked all the kids to get out of the vehicles, and I intentionally split them up. I made them sit on busses with kids I knew they didn’t know that well. I told them to intentionally sit with someone they hadn’t spoken to yet or didn’t know. I gave them a list of questions to ask the other person…just simple get to know you questions…and when they were done…to start again with someone new. We did this after every stop on the way down to Florida. There was moaning, there was grumbling, there were youth who told me this idea was silly and they didn’t want to do it. Then they did. I heard conversations I knew hadn’t happened before. I heard kids learning about each other…with kids they otherwise would not have talked to. When we left Florida to come back home…I let them choose who to sit with…and I was happy to see kids intentionally sitting with kids the whole ride back that didn’t know each other before we started. A particular youth had told me before the trip they had no intention of spending time with anyone outside their circle. On the last night of the trip...they admitted to the group they were glad I made them go through that activity. They felt like they had 18 new friends. They now had a community.

The trip was not perfect. No trip is. Some kids enjoyed it more than others. But everything I planned out happened according to plan. The goal of the trip, to build real community, was realized. One of the adults on that trip had been a lifelong member of the church and grown up in the youth group. When we started to pull back into town, she turned to me and said, “This is the best trip this youth group has ever done. You did a great job.” I took that to heart. It FELT like the best trip I had ever done. Not because of the destination and the success in planning. It was and remains my favorite trip because I wanted these kids to genuinely grow together and love each other. That goal was accomplished. I’m still so very proud of that to this day.