Being a small youth group rocks.  In the future when I get bummed out because “we’re not as big as first baptist” or other reasons related to our size, I’m going to have to remind myself of this weekend and the success it brought our ministry.

This weekend we had a family camping trip to a nearby camping area.  On Friday afternoon, the ladies and I headed up early to work on our tans, bond, and find our camps.  That evening, two more families joined us.

This was my favorite event by far, not because of numbers or anything like that, but because of the fellowship that was created.  One of the boys kept relishing in the fellowship that camping brings, and he had a huge point.  Camping causes people to work together in order to survive.

The other reason I loved this event was the time I got to spend with parents.  Our little Baptist church has monthly fellowship dinners in which I try to eat with different families, but camping brought more bonding than just our average Baptist potluck.  I got to see how the teenagers and parents interact with each other–their parenting techniques, the way the teens respond to them, and the dynamics of the families as a whole.  I now understand a few of the the teens a whole lot better just by getting to spend a weekend with their families.  The two families that went got to know each other a whole lot better, and pointed out to me that even though they had been in the same church for three years, they have never talked as much as they did just in that one night.

SUCCESS! *ching ching*
(I don’t know that the ching ching noise is for, but let’s roll with it.)

Our ministry is going to be going through some changes here soon, and I think this weekend was an awesome, and needed time to relax, destress, and grow together.  This is true fellowship.  Hopefully we can do something to this effect in the future, where we bring families together in order to grow our ministry.  As I pointed out to one parent, it’s not my duty to just minister to the students, because that just makes me their babysitter.  It’s my duty to minister to the family as a whole.