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Plaster Party

Plaster of Paris, watercolor paints, and plaster molds can be purchased rather inexpensively at craft stores for this unique activity. Encourage your youth group to get creative, by hosting a Plaster Party at your church, or in your home... You can advertise the event with posters that say "Get Plastered!" and possibly charge a small admission to help cover the costs. Teens will design and paint their own plaster molds, and you can encourage creativity with 'best looking', 'most colorful', 'most retro-design', 'worst eye-sore design', etc. awards....

A good spiritual discussion would be "Created In God's Image: What does it mean?" or "You Are Fearfully and Wonderfully Made" or "Designed For Good Works In Christ"

Submitted by Skip Brown, Bear Lake Bible Chapel, Apopka, Florida

24 hour famine

Encourage your teens to realize the physical needs of third world countries and the mission efforts there, by hosting a 24 hour famine.
The teens contract not to eat any food (or gum, or candy) for a 24 hour period, during which they have a chance to think about World relief efforts. You may want to begin the effort as a youth group overnighter, beginning at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, and concluding at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday. During the retreat, you should show presentations about Christian mission efforts on the foreign field, missionary movies of a biographical nature, and include games that remind the teens about how fortunate we are, and how big the need for mission efforts. Encourage the teens to be involved with your church's mission board, or to plan on attending a mission trip

submitted by Skip Brown, Bear Lake Bible Chapel, Apopka, Florida

24 Hour Famine PLUS

A great activity to add to the 24 Hour Famine that makes it hit home even more is to have your group scrounge through the dumpster to find cardboard boxes, plastic, tarps, whatever to build shelters. Have the group construct the shelter in an unheated breezeway or outdoors. Hold group activities in the shelter or spend the entire night in the shelter. It really adds to the experience, and its a better lesson than playing volleyball all night long.

submitted by Barb Huff, YMCA of Central Stark County, Canton OH/First Church of the Nazarene, New Philadelphia OH

T-shirt designs

Have the teens in your group create their own T-shirt designs with simple paints, tie-die, or home-made iron on designs. T-shirts paints and tie-die material are easily purchased at your local craft story, but home-made iron on designs will take a little bit more preparation. To create home made T-shirts, you will need either a scanner, or digital camera, a computer with the appropriate software, an inkjet printer, and special T-shirt printing papers purchased from your local computer store. First, the teens design their own t-shirt design... A drawing, or multi-media design. This is scanned or photographed, and then printed on the special computer paper with the inkjet printer. The image on the paper can be ironed on to the t-shirt, and will create a youth group memory for your teens. Appropriate discussions would be: "Clothes In the Bible" or "What is God's feeling about Fashion?" or "Clothed In Righteousness".

Submitted by Skip Brown, Bear Lake Bible Chapel, Apopka, Florida

Design a trainer

You will need A4 paper, colour pens, pencils and an old trainer to draw round ( can be produced beforehand). Get the young people to design the ultimate designer training shoe, they can go wild with the design process and add any gizmo they like. Also you can get the group to price the product and say how much it will cost at each stage; design, production, marketing etc Once the design is finished you can talk about the real cost of the trainer, and other designer clothes. In China, workers earn $30 to $42 per month in regular working wages, this is less than you would pay for a pair of training shoes.
Possible angles could be "our value in the world, our value to God" "slavery: is it real?" "consumerism and Christianity"
This link will give a very good overview of the forced labour issues http://cbae.nmsu.edu/mgt/jpub/boje/vnwomennike/

submitted by Ian Hurst, Worle Baptist Church,Somerset, England,

NASA consensus decision making task

INSTRUCTIONS: You are a member of a space craft originally scheduled to rendezvous with a mother ship on the lighted side of the moon. Due to mechanical difficulties, however, your ship was forced to land at a spot some 200 miles from the rendezvous point. During landing, much of the equipment aboard was damaged and, since survival depends on reaching the mother ship, the most critical items available must be chosen for the 200 mile trip. Below are listed the 15 items left intact and undamaged after landing. Your task is to rank order them in terms of their importance for your crew in allowing them to reach the rendezvous point. Place the number 1 by the most important item; the number 2 by the second most important and so on, through number 15, the least important. You have fifteen minutes to complete this phase of the exercise. Everything you need for this is contained within the Nasa-ywr.pdf file click to download

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