Have you ever tried…

On Friday night, we transformed our 5th Quarter event into a Dance Party.  It was an event unlike any other we have done and as Katie said, “this was the best 5th Quarter ever”. What we did:

• We bought tons of blacklights and blacklight bulbs and transformed the high school room into a big dance floor.
• We made over 50 t-shirts.  They were white with neon green lettering saying “5th Quarter” across the chest and then below it “It’s always overtime at Cedar Run”.
• We hung up a few rolls of black paper on the walls so that students could write on them.
• We also provided tons of highlighters for students to write on the black paper and on the t-shirts.
• Lastly, we had one of our leaders be the DJ, mixing music and keeping everyone rocking

Now, we didn’t abandon the other components of 5th Quarter as we still had a fire pit for s’mores and are other regular things.  But it became clear, that once the dance party started, that became was the main attraction.  I felt bad for the parents helping with the food because they just sat around most of the night because everyone was in the dance room. How is this helpful to our ministry? Now, doing a dance party can be quite controversial as dancing in christian circles is not always encouraged.  But, at Cedar Run, we are a non-denominational small-to-medium sized church with not lots of tradition.  Because of this, we have done some very impromptu dance parties throughout the years so we thought this would be something we would like to try.  But, in order to do this, I felt that there had to be some good benefits to doing this.  Here are the benefits we felt we could gain by doing this:

• It was a way to draw students into our Church.  As I have posted before, 5th Quarter has been a great bridge event.  Because of this, we already have a solid reputation around the area and felt that we could have a big draw.
• The t-shirts are a good promotion tool as the students will likely wear those shirts again, spurring possible questions like, “Where did you get that shirt” or “You had a dance party at a Church”???
• The word about Cedar Run would expand.  So far, the excitement that we generated from the dance party was something we haven’t generated since the Super Bowl Bash.  It gets people talking and hopefully helps the students realize that there is something for them at Cedar Run.
• It was a good opportunity to promote other things we were doing at Cedar Run.  Our latest Sunday night series is on “Tough Choices”.  We figured that if more non-Christians were going to come to 5th Quarter on Friday night, this would be a great series to promote for them to come to.  So, as students were leaving, the leaders and I passed out our fliers for Sunday night.  Students got to see that we weren’t a place in which you just had fun at.  We were a place where we talked about tough choices students face.

The one thing I have always loved about Cedar Run is that they give us the freedom to try new things.  They allow us to be creative in our efforts to draw students (as long as it is safe).  If all we ever did was Sunday School and then Sunday night Youth Group, then I feel that we would have missed opportunities to draw new students into our program.  That is the purpose of these “bridge events”.  A dance party is neither traditional or a new idea.  But, it is something we wanted to try and I am glad we did.]]>