January 2, 2023
As I wrote in part one of this article several weeks ago: being an Evangelical Christian can lead to some pretty reckless behavior. When you believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing God has your back and is looking over you at all times, then you sometimes do things that aren’t well thought through.
Here are three MORE instances from my past in which I was either involved in or witnessed reckless behavior that was inspired by God:
A Bad Part of Town
When I was young and attending youth group, the leaders would often put on fundraising events. The leaders would plan everything, the youth would help out, and the primary market was the main body of the church congregation—providing them some kind of value in exchange for money. We’d then put that money toward going to church camp in the summer so that each kid’s family wouldn’t have to pay the full price of attending.
One such fundraising event was a yard sale. People in the church were invited to donate stuff they didn’t want and then other people could come and buy what they wanted. The money would go toward youth group activities.
Except the thrift store they’d picked out to host the event was in a not-so-great part of town, to put it lightly.
On the day of the yard sale, the youth kids were assigned jobs and tasks. One of those jobs was holding up signs that advertised the event. Me and one other kid were loaded up into a church van, given signs, and dropped off on a street corner, alone, in the middle of a busy boulevard in this not-so-great part of town. There, we spent about an hour standing there, unsupervised, and holding up a sign pointing toward our yard sale.
This was in the late 90s. I highly doubt this would still happen today (although it might; you never know with some of these churches who think they have God’s protection at all times, no matter what).
Thankfully, we weren’t kidnapped. The only thing I remember was that when the church van came back around to pick us up, the youth leader pointed out that we’d been holding our signs the wrong way. My sign pointed one way down the boulevard while the other kid’s sign was pointing the exact opposite direction. We had a nice laugh about that.
Spending the Night on the Church Roof
That same youth group from the above story once grew so huge that the sheer size of it seemed to be bordering on unmanageable. Every Sunday saw damn near 100 kids or more. This was a moderate-to-small neighborhood church, not a megachurch, so the impressive youth group numbers were definitely something that the church became proud of. However, since the church was kind of small, there wasn’t a huge pool of people to pull from to volunteer as youth leaders. I have no idea what the leader-to-kid ratio was back then, but it couldn’t have been good.
That’s dangerous in itself, but the real dangerous thing was that, like all churches that are obsessed with numbers (since the Church is a business) they wanted even more kids to show up on Sunday evening for youth group. To do that, the youth director would come up with crazy antics to bribe kids to bring their friends on Sunday. One time, he promised that if people brought their friends and they had a total attendance of X (I don’t remember the exact number) then he would spend an entire weekend on the roof of the church.
Naturally, a hundred middle and high school kids got excited about that, so they bent over backwards to get their “unchurched” friends to come to youth group. The target number was swiftly passed and, true to his word, the youth director spent the weekend on the roof of the church.
But this church didn’t have a flat roof. It was angular in all places, and quite steep. I remember seeing the youth director’s setup—a sleeping bag, a blanket, and some very basic supplies—all situated precariously at a 45 degree angle on the roof.
I couldn’t help but imagine him slipping into a deep sleep in the middle of the night, rolling too far the wrong way, and falling to his doom.
Thankfully that didn’t happen, but there were absolutely zero precautionary measures preventing it.
Mission Trip Work Project
When I was in ninth grade, that same youth group decided to mix things up for our summer trip. Usually we went to Big Stuf camp, which I wrote about briefly in my article Why I Suppressed My Emotions as a Deconverted Man. That camp was all about hanging out on the beach, having a good time, listening to a cool worship band with loud music, and of course, a very emotional finale at the end of the week where everyone was supposed to “give their life to Jesus.”
That summer, however, my youth group wanted to shift their focus to serving others. So we went to a place where a bunch of other youth groups in the south came together to do mission work—meaning work on houses for people who couldn’t do it themselves.
My small group was assigned a small home that belonged to an elderly woman. We had to clean gutters, paint, and do minor construction. We were all around fourteen years old and had zero experience doing any of this stuff.
I remember personally being on the very top step of a ladder leaning precariously against the wall of the house, cleaning out gutters while the ladder wobbled beneath me. I remember laying belly down on the roof, dangling over the edge so I could paint the very top part of the home an ugly shade of green. Since it was the summer, there were wasp nests everywhere, and the wasps were pissed at all our commotion and buzzing all around. I wonder if any of the kids happened to be allergic to them.
And, of course, since we were just a bunch of kids with no construction experience, I remember how incomplete the job was at the end of the week. Even with my amateur eyes, I could easily tell that we were not done. I remember asking one of the adults if someone was going to come behind us and finish up after we’d left, but he had no answer for me and dodged my question like a practiced pro.
Conclusion
The late 90s and the early 2000s were quite a time for youth group. My church was pretty moderate and still came up with some pretty dangerous situations for both the youth and the staff. I can only shudder to think what other, larger churches might have dreamed up that were far worse.