Friday night, our church did the unthinkable. We hosted a Jr. High and High School Lock-In. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, a Lock-In is a youth event where a handful of adults and a bunch of teenagers hunker down for the night in a church building. For 9 hours or so we eat a lot of pizza, banana splits, pringles, and various other forms of health foods. In between the eating we play fun, quirky group games, sing songs, talk about our faith, study the Bible, and worship God. Oh yeah, you don’t sleep either. At least that’s the idea.

This was a surreal experience for me. I grew up in this congregation, and when I was a teenager our youth group had about 5 people in it and we were scattered throughout 5 different grade levels. Until I went off to Harding University, I had no concept of what a youth group was, much less youth group activities. This might come as a shock to some of you, but the first Youth Group Weekend Retreat I attended was the one I planned for my youth group when I was a Youth Minister.

You can imagine my surprise when 22 kids showed up for this Lock-In Friday night (the first lock-in in our congregation’s history). 22! That may not sound like a high number, but trust me for our little church this was a milestone. Only a handful of that number were kids from our church. The rest were friends they invited.

God is doing some big things in our little church, and this was just one example. I can’t wait to see what he does next.