The United States Marine Corp has a motto that
they never leave a soldier behind on the battlefield. In the same way,
in every youth ministry interview I have been asked some variant of the
question, "What would you do if you discovered that you’ve left a
student at a location?" As a youth worker who loves taking students on
road trips, this is a very practical question and it speaks to the very
heart of youth ministry road trips. At the end of the day, each child
that you take on a trip needs to return on that trip. Every child
matters!
The reality is that during each person’s youth ministry career there is
one story about you leaving a student at a rest stop. When I was in
high school we all told the story about our youth pastor leaving the
senior pastor’s daughter at a Christian college. Unfortunately, in the
days before cell phones, he didn’t discover his mistake until he
arrived in the church parking lot to find his boss steaming in the
parking lot because his 14 year old daughter had called him hysterical
from the school’s bookstore because she had been left behind. That
story, while funny, has haunted me every time that I’ve taken students
from my ministry on a road trip. But I don’t think that I’ve had
success in this area of my ministry because I’m haunted, I think it’s
because I’ve implemented a simple system to ensure that I never leave
student’s behind.
3 Practical Failsafe Measures to Ensure You Never Leave a Student Behind on a Road Trip
- We always travel together. On
multiple vehicle trips, I alway have the group travel together. This
seems exceedingly simple but I am surprised to discover that not all
youth ministries do this. When we stop for gas, we all stop together
and we all leave together. When we leave an event, we don’t leave
the main location until I’ve checked every name off the list
physically. This means that no matter how large the group, my eyes have
made visual contact with every person we’ve brought. And I won’t give
the "all clear" to leave the main event location until I have accounted
for every student. - Never allow students to change vehicles. When
I first started doing road trips I thought it would be fun to have a
constant shuffling of students in vehicles. From a group dynamics
perspective this made some sense but it was terribly hard to keep track
of people. Now we simply don’t allow, no matter how much whining or
reasoning, a student to move vehicles on a trip. They can change seats
in a vehicle but the vehicle we leave the church in is their vehicle
for the trip. This makes it simple for each driver to do a count at
each stop before they leave. It seems a student should notice if the person they were sitting next to was not on the van. So my job is simply to walk around to each
vehicle and make sure each driver has everyone. When all the drivers
have everyone, we depart… together. - We talk about it all the time. "Nine out of ten, that’s an ‘A’ in my book."
I have intentionally ingrained a joke into the youth group for the sake
of keeping our desire to bring everyone home that we left home with. This is
a fun way to keep the discussion on everyone’s mind and much less
annoying than the trips mantra being "Do we have everyone?"
On every road trip I start off by telling everyone how many people are
on the trip and then introduce the joke. "Today we are going to Cedar
Point in Sandusky, Ohio. We’re leaving the park at 6:00 PM and it’s
your responsibility to be at the meet-up location so you don’t get left
behind. Today there are 36 of you and one of me. In my book 36 out of
37 is 97%. (Pause) And that’s an A in my book. Good enough for me." It
always gets a laugh and it always keeps the thought in everyone’s mind
that they don’t want to get left behind. The last kid leaving the bathroom and running to the van will say something like "I don’t want to be the reason you don’t get an A+."
Eventually, it
will happen. My system will fail and I’ll leave someone behind at the
Super J on Interstate 75 south of Detroit. To answer that parent’s
question of "What would I do if I discovered I’ve left someone behind?"
I like to tell them these two answers. First, I’d call their cell
phone. This is 2007 and most students have a cell phone. (They were
probably playing with it in the gas station in the first place and
that’s why they got left behind.) And second, I still got an A
because 9 our of 10 is 90%. (Heck, 90% is better than I did in almost
every class in Bible College.) All jokes aside, I answer that question
by reassuring parents that we have a system with 3 failsafe measures
built into it and that we will do everything we can possibly do to
ensure that it never happens.
