All the Fun Actuaries Will Allow

In Young Life clubs, we routinely sent kids to the electric chair. A chair was hooked up to a 6-volt battery. Sometimes we’d use a quiz show format, and kids would be zapped for giving the wrong answer. Sometimes the shock was the punchline to a skit. Sometimes, students or leaders would be dared to take the chair. All of this in good fun, of course.

Another game was more likely to incur psychological rather than physical pain. Three girls and three boys were chosen as volunteers. A sheet was hung across one corner of the room. The same bright lipstick was applied to each girl, who then went behind the sheet. Small holes in the sheet revealed three pairs of lips. Each boy was assigned a pair of lips to kiss and told that they were to guess which girl they kissed. The boys didn’t know that each of their mothers had been asked to come to the club and to wear the same lipstick as the girls. The expression of shock on the boys’ faces as the mothers came from behind the curtain? Priceless.

I should probably explain “Young Life” to many of you. It’s a Christian ministry for teenagers that was founded by Jim Rayburn, a Presbyterian minister, in 1941. Students were invited to “club,” a meeting usually held in the home of a fellow student.

“Club” was usually an hour long and consisted mostly of games, skits, and songs. Meetings concluded with a short talk about Jesus.

I attended Young Life Club as a student in the late 1970s and was a volunteer Young Life leader in the early 1980s. (I was the youngest of five kids, and my older brothers and sisters were all active in Young Life. For a short time, my mother was on staff.) Young Life continues to serve students throughout this country and throughout the world.

Young Life has a large network of camps, with weekend camps during the school year and week-long camps in the summer. I attended Woodleaf Camp in Northern California. The highlight of Winter Camp was a game called Wells Fargo.

A field was watered down to make it exceptionally muddy. Sometimes the weather made the fields icy as well. Campers were divided into two teams, the Cowboys and the Indians. Each student and leader was given a piece of tape to wear on the forehead — a “scalp.” One of the objectives of the game (along with stealing “gold” from the other team’s “bank”) was to scalp as many members of the other team as possible. Once you were scalped, you were out of the game. Girls could scalp boys, but boys couldn’t scalp girls. Often, a dozen girls would strategically gang together to target even the largest boy. (Not even a lineman is safe when the cheerleading squad attacks.)

When the game was over, players would jump in the chilly lake to clean off because warm (let alone hot) showers would be at a premium. Not surprisingly, injuries were not rare.

A guiding principle of Young Life was stated by founder Jim Rayburn: “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the Gospel.” Young Life always tried to appeal to the best parts of the teenager’s nature—desire for adventure, to push boundaries, for authenticity, and even rebelliousness, in the best sense of the word. The wild activities were all part of the plan to prepare students to hear the gospel: 1) God made us and loves us, 2) Our sin separates us from God, 3) Jesus paid for our sin on the cross, 4) We need to accept God’s gift of salvation.

The contemporary world is much more litigious than the world of my youth. These days, I’m sure lawyers and safety analysts scrutinize all camp activities. Any skit or game that might offend is probably no longer considered. Youth ministry has been tamed through the years, which is all well and good as long as the Gospel is preached. That will always cause offense in and of itself.