Summer Over

We just had our last preteen event of the summer.  We are behind most of the country with back to school.  Back to school for us isn’t until after labor day – September 7th.  The event we had tonight was a “game show night”.  I hired a Extreme Fun, a third party company, to do the event.  It was RAD!  Probably our most fun event since I have been on staff here!  Preteens starred in their own game show competing in various physical, trivia and creative challenges.

What I liked most about the event was that I didn’t lead it.  Neither did the other leaders in our group. Extreme Fun did everything!  I sat back and hung out with preteens.  A great way to run events!  After this summer, my outlook on doing fun relational events has totally changed.  I’ve blogged about keeping events simple, but I am now going a step further.   Outsourcing events is the way to go for me from here on out.  If I host a preteen event at church, I am going to have a third party company come and and lead it.  Much more off me and my leaders’ shoulders.  We get to build relationships with preteens instead of managing the crowd and playing referee all night.  Takes much less prep time as well.  Time we could better use to build relationships with preteens outside of programming.  I now allocate money for events in my budget and charge a fee to attend.  The fee is cheap ($5-$10) and usually covers just a portion of the event.

Now, I won’t outsource every event.  Just the ones at church.  Don’t want to miss out on laser tag, paintballing, water park, etc throughout the year.  Those are super fun times!

I still have to go online and pay Extreme Fun and I am pretty tired now.  My soft cozy bed is calling me.  And if you are in the San Diego surrounding area, book Extreme Fun for your next event.  And they don’t pay me a commission or anything if you book them through me.  I just think they are super.

Now that this event is over, we’ve got a solid two weeks of NOTHING.  No midweek or events till September 8th.  Just Sunday services.  And most everybody on the children’s and youth staff at my church will take some vacation time.  It is our way of taking a breather before back to school.  We did the same thing two weeks before summer started.  A really healthy way of doing ministry by the way.  I am saving my vacation to go home to New Orleans around Christmas.  But I won’t get much done the next two weeks.  I will show up to work but go in late, take long lunch breaks, leave early and do some recreational reading during the day.  A nice change of pace.  Anyway, hope you had a great summer!

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