Senior Faith Stories

Last night at youth group one of our students rocked world with her faith story. She was honest, vulnerable, and told her story of tragedy and redemption like she's been doing it for years. I met with her during the week to hear the story, give some feedback and guide her towards to aspects that would really connect with the rest of our students. Immediately I knew that her story should change our evening, and would give a lot of students deep conversations that they crave. My favorite part of hearing her prep her story was that looking across that table she said, I really hope a few of the other girls in our group hear what I'm saying and don't follow my path. That's the right attitude to have about sharing, she wanted her story to mean something and it did.

I reshaped the evening to allow more time for the great senior story and conversation afterwards. I also planned a game called "don't break the chain" to begin the evening... which was a huge flop. The idea of the game was that these cards each had an unusual action on them like "bark like dog, dance the chicken dance..." and I had hoped that by playing with them like a name game would be really fun. Unfortunately we had far too many students to play like a name game and we abandoned the game after a valiant effort.

We rearranged our evening so that the senior faith story would be central, so after our failed ice breaker we headed back to the youth room and I introduced our senior. After she shared, I asked a few followup questions (things that I thought other students may be wondering) and at one point as she was crying I went and stood next to her to comfort her. When she was finished I asked adult leaders to come forward to the center of the room and I paired them up and assigned grade levels to each pair. Our house groups are loosely divided by grade, so I thought they'd have the best conversations in these groups. I did allow students to change groups if they felt it would be better for them, and several between junior and sophomore did switch groups.

Our small group questions were all about hope, which was a great conversation to have following the faith story. I should have made a broad announcement to have small group leaders debrief from the story first, but I forgot. I did catch 3 of the 4 groups with those instructions and it seemed debriefing from the story was really good before reading the passage (Romans 8:31-39) and talking about hope.