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Outreach: Retreats and Camp Out Ideas

Ideas for Retreats and Teen Camp Outs

Cold Feet
• Have a couple of pans of crushed ice ready before your meeting. The deeper and thicker the
   ice the better.
• Hide three objects in each pan (marbles, quarters, dice, whatever you have handy.)
• To start the game, select two bold participants, and have them remove their shoes and socks.
• Instruct the two students that the objective is to dig out all three hidden objects using only
   their feet.
• Reward the winner (the first to remove all objects) with a warm towel for the feet—on second
   thought, give the loser one too! 

Bonfire
Organize a bonfire where students bring possessions they need to sacrifice. Make sure they have their parent’s permission. The possessions should be something the students are spending too much time with or obsessing over in some way. Celebrate with a complete surrender of those objects with a commitment to worship God alone.

If not actual possessions, you can also have the students jot down the things in their life that keep them from spending more time with God. Then wad up the paper, and throw it into the fire.

Think Fast
Here’s how it works. Get a ball and seat your group in a circle. If your group is large, get more than one ball and form more than one circle. You, as the leader, will shout out a category. Whoever has the ball has to name something in that category.

After successfully naming something, he or she will throw the ball (or pillow, or whatever you have handy) to someone else in the circle. Each person must name something in that category. Once someone hesitates more than 3 seconds (you can count out loud), he or she loses and is eliminated from the circle. An incorrect answer also causes someone to be eliminated.

You then move onto a new category. Below are some suggested categories. Feel free to come up with your own—just make sure you do “things that are dead” and “things that are alive” as your last two categories.

• Cities of the World
• Olympic sports (summer or winter)
• Cafeteria food
• Famous Actors, Actresses
• Leaders of our church
• Things that are dead
• Things that are alive

 
  

Buck Buck
(Note: this game can be a bit dangerous, so proceed only with adequate adult supervision and use common sense)

• Divide the group into teams. One member of the first team bends over and wraps his or her arms around a tree or similar object (or a very big person in body mass).

• The next member bends over and hugs the first one around the waist, and the remaining members of the team do the same one after the other to form a "horse."

• The other team takes turns shouting "buck buck number 1 (2, 3,...) coming!" Then, with a running start, jump onto the back of the "horse."

• Each team member stays on the horse while subsequent jumpers accumulate.

• The objective of the jumping team is to collapse or "break" the horse, and the objective of the horse team is to get a member of the jumping team to touch the ground with any part of their body and without breaking the horse. (You can vary these rules if you like.) 

• The winning team gets to jump in the next round. 

Collapses can be especially stressful for the horse team because the jumpers keep their feet away from the ground, thus doing nothing to ease the impact.

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