Suicide Prevention

Last night at youth group we hosted an intense faith story from a set of parents who's teenager died from suicide several years ago. The evening was okay, not a spectacular event, but a good evening together. What I'm most happy with though is that we did it and did it well, including sending emails to parents ahead of time to give them some context for Sunday night's group.

To start with we invited a speaker who does suicide prevention talks at area schools to come and share her faith story. The story could have been a little better told, it was clear that she was used to sharing the prevention side rather than the story of her son, but it was captivating for the teenagers and she and her husband had lots of good God connections.

We also invited a team of suicide counselors to meet with our small group leaders ahead of time, spending 30 minutes talking through the subject, potential questions that students might have and thinking through prevention outside of youth group. This time could have been better organized, but it was comforting and good to get our leaders into the right perspective before we met. These experts stayed throughout the evening, just in case there was something out of the ordinary or need for more help, but we didn't need to use them.

We began our evening with our normal gathering, followed by a quick game of Family Feud. I homemade this edition of family feud by monkeying with power point. Basically I just listed the 10 answers in columns and then put white boxes over each answer that would disappear when clicked on. Very simple and it allowed kids to guess answers randomly. I also tweaked the format to make the game more fun. Each round I invited 3 boy students and 3 girls students to participate. They each gave one answer a piece to try to get on the board, scoring one point per answer. Then I asked 3 leaders to guess a correct answer too, which meant three teams scoring points. The style was great, everyone had a chance to participate, we didn't drag on any of the categories, and the leaders beat the kids... a perfect game.

The last piece of our evening that went well was the small group conversation after the faith story. I had created two small group sessions in case there was discomfort with the suicide lesson, but we didn't end up using the Bible study that I wrote because each group dove into the suicide discussion so smoothly. The Bible study would have been about Naomi and Ruth, emphasizing the compassion to stay with each other during grief, but we'll save that for another time.