#410. The Youth Group Intern
Sep 26th by JonGrowing up as a pastor’s kid, I got accustomed to the weird phone calls my father would often get. From requests to physically break up fist fights to complaints that the ex-stripper at church was still dressing too scandalously on Sunday mornings, a parade of calls marched across our phone. But the one my dad dreaded most was the “middle of the night something went wrong at the youth group retreat” call.
The chances of receiving this type of call may increase dramatically when your church hires a youth group intern. It’s possible your church never had one though. Maybe all your youth workers were beacons of stone age maturity, oak trees of wisdom planted deep within God’s earth to spread knowledge and gentle patience to today’s youth. But if you hang around the church long enough, you’re going to run into one.
Here are 3 things you can expect from the youth intern:
1. Stitches
Somebody is getting a Youth Group Scar or “YGS” if you will. (Pronounced “Yags” like “bags” but with a Y. I’m not sure where the invisible “a” comes from, my youth minister friends refuse to reveal their secrets.) Whether it’s a trust fall that goes wrong, a road trip church van game that goes amiss or a skit that goes spectacularly askew, at some point, at least three kids and one innocent bystander are getting some YGS.
2. Pranks
Youth group interns tend to be like Merlin when it comes to pranks. The creativity and frequency they put into something as simple as toilet papering someone’s house is stunning. Honestly, they are like Picasso in his blue period, using the trees in your yard like some sort of leafy canvas. I don’t know if I can fit another comparison into this paragraph, but trust me, the youth intern prank is a thing of beauty.
3. The Best Games
Youth group interns come up with the best games. Maybe they’re more deeply connected to the concept of “play,” or haven’t been weighed down with trying to juggle an anemic youth group budget, but for some reason, they can turn a rainy afternoon into the greatest game you’ve ever played. You might see a trash can on wheels, wiffle ball bat and squirt gun as an assortment of random items, but they don’t. They see “wiffle-mania,” the fastest, wettest, craziest game your church will ever know.
I was never a youth group intern but I did help out once at my dad’s church. Apparently the main help I provided was to dress up like Britney Spears in a horrible song parody that I hope never surfaces on Youtube. But despite that hot pink dance outfit nightmare, I’m a huge fan of youth group interns. Scott Hodge, one of my new favorite pastors, recently hired a 19-year old to help with music. He believes the energy and rawness that young employees bring is invaluable. I agree. I just hope if you do hire a youth intern, you go easy on him/her when your minister gets a midnight phone call like this:
“The stitches will be out in a week. I guess it’s true what they say, a baby raccoon’s cuteness is only equaled by its ferocity.”
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Comments
I was a youth intern for a summer. It was a small church in a small town where the youth pastor and I out numbered the kids. I dug a 4 foot deep drainage ditch for 50 ft along the church. Under my humorless fascisto senior pastor this was clearly the best summer of my life.
I love this comment from one of my students: “Remember when ‘youth intern guy’ had the bonfire and we took turns jumping over it and then we chased each other with branches that were on fire….that was awesome….”
I found out 3 months later….
My junior year in high school we got a new youth pastor. It was still his first month on the job and he had to baptize a few people at the evening service. The youth choir happenned to be singing that night also and the choir loft was strategically placed right beside the baptism pit. My friend’s brother went to walmart as soon as he realized this and bought as many goldfish as he could and dumped them over the edge of the pit right before the service started. The YP freaked.
Wow… that’s a lot of comments…
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As a youth ministry intern last year, fresh out of college, I watched from a distance as a group of high school students attempted to get a deer into their room at the winter retreat. They were supposed to be asleep almost 2 hours earlier, but I didn’t care. I was so silly that I actually made phone calls to their room in hopes that the entering deer might go ridiculously crazy. The deer actually did go into their room, but thankfully no one was hurt. Even if something bad did happen, I would’ve never admitted to knowing what was going on. ha
I was given a link to this entry because I am a youth group intern. I also decided tonight just for the fun of it, to do a game based on the old game show “beat the clock” On that show they were usually given an easy task like “put the 3 balls through the hoop” then just as the clock would start to count down, the host would “remember” that the contestants had to do it blindfolded.
On my version, I am going to give them an easy task like walk around the outside of the church building. then just as they are about to start, I am going to tell them that there are 4 rules about how it must be done. but I am not going to tell them the rules, they have to find out for themselves as they go along.
While in college, I interned with a good friend of mine. We were actually in that same church's youth group while we were in high school. Our senior year of high school at camp in Wisconsin, one of the girls' cabins woke up with human poop on their front step. No matter who we accused of the crime, the boys blamed it on chewy, the pink yard flamingo that was a staple at camp. Unfortunately, the mess was cleaned up by one of the girls that also wound up interning for this church. Years later, the true culprit came out and we laugh about it to this day. This may be a disgusting story but the best part is that five years later the guilty party and the poor girl who cleaned it up…are married.