Backwards Club

"Bye! Thanks for coming to Club. See you next week at Campaigners!" is how we greeted all the kids as they walked into Backwards Club tonight. Get it? Backwards... so we pretended they were leaving. Every single kid looked at us so confused. The whole night was an awesome mess of backwardness that just felt awkward and hilarious.

 

We encouraged kids to wear their clothes backwards. Whether they knew ahead of time or not, they could flip their shirts and sweatshirts around once they arrived. You know we love our snap backs too and conveniently we already wear those backwards.

We've got a great mix of upper and lower classman these days and I was thrilled that Corey came tonight for the first time. I hope that every kid that walks through those doors will feel welcomed right away. We're trying to run a different kind of show here where everyone is included no matter what.

Our HS boys could work on their picture taking arrangements but I was informed that they're "straight muggin" here.

We ran the entire format of Club backwards tonight so the Club talk came first. If you're a YL leader you know how your heart starts racing a little bit right before you start talking. Not going to lie, it was a little bit more terrifying to jump up front right away before we did anything else. The kids sat down and I started telling them my story.

We wrote letters to God tonight and the kids spread out all over the room. Most weeks we end in small groups, like mini-Campaigners, but this week we wanted to switch things up. We'll save their letters and then mail them back to them next semester or even a year from now.

Ryan played, "He Knows My Name," next. It's a new song to us but a class Tecumseh Vince song and I hope it'll catch on here. While we were sitting and singing this song the girl beside me leaned over and said, "Oh! I get it. We're going to do all the fun stuff at the end." This whole backwards-thing was throwing everyone for a loop but they were catching on.

We played Backwards Charades. Saba stood up front and we projected words on the screen behind her. The entire crowd acted out things like swimmer, touch down dance, monkey, grandma knitting a sweater, Ryan playing guitar and singing, and tap dancer while Saba guessed. After she guessed all the words we brought in Nick, who had been waiting outside, to play and see if he could guess the words faster.

Then we split up into guys and girls to unshuffle a deck of 52 cards. Once they'd been equally distributed to everyone on the team they had to start their pile with the Ace of hearts. Whoever had the King of hearts would put their card down followed by the Queen and so on. You could only work on one suit at a time and you couldn't touch any one's cards except your own.

Both teams were screaming as they worked to build their pile in the right order, "NINE OF DIAMONDS! WHO HAS THE NINE OF DIAMONDS!"

The girls flew through the task and were victorious over the boys.

We raffled off some sweet prizes and then played Name That Backwards Song. We found an app that will reverse songs and the five kids up front had to try to recognize and name the song first. It's a lot harder then you would expect to name very well-known songs.

We ran out of time but we were also going to play Backwards Simon Says and race to see who could say the alphabet backwards the fastest. Ryan played fast songs to finish out Club but of course we sang them in the reverse order of all the verses, bridge and chorus.

Tonight was hilarious and I loved getting to play with all of these kids. Young Life is always a high light of my week and I can't imagine not getting to do this together.

As the kids walked out the door to their parents we said, "Hi! Welcome to Club. We're going to have such a great time tonight."