We’ve all had illustrations that didn’t quite work how we thought, but I’ve never ended up at the doctor because of one.
Do you have an illustration gone bad story? Share it in the comments, and our favorite wins a download of RaceThis 2 from Simply Youth Ministry.
Dan’s Back from Jason Mitchell on Vimeo.
Thanks to Rick Lawrence of Group Magazine for the tip off.
this isnt mine, but it happened to a friend of mine who is also in youth ministry..
he was trying to demonstrate the way sin shattered the perfect image of God man was originally created in… and at the build up of the message he had a big full length mirror on stage and throughout the message he was holding an apple. at the climax of the message he was going to throw the apple at the mirror & shatter it to illustrate the devastation of sin on humanity.
he built it up… threw the apple as hard as he could….
and it bounced off the mirror & rolled off the stage without even so much as cracking the mirror 🙂
I did a talk on authority at a local high school chapel. The main focus of the talk was on rules.
To illustrate how a teenager treats rules, I had a box with a “bomb” in it. Two teenage boys would be the protectors of that box (aka authority figures) and two teenage boys would be trying to touch that box (aka rule braking teens). All the rule braking teens knew was if they touch the box they get a “surprise”.
Sounds great right? Teenagers wrestling with authority figures about rules and finding out that all the authority figure was trying to do was protect from destruction in their life.
To my surprise, when I said go, one of the “authority figures” sprinted towards the “rule braking teen” and grabbed him. He picked him up and body slammed him in the middle of the isle. All the while his dad who was a teacher at the school was watching.
Ya……don’t think I will use that one again.
Sorry about your back Dan. Great blog!
I did a talk about violence one night and had two of my boys stage a fight during a song. I didn’t tell my volunteers and one of my adults jumped of the stage and got in the middle grabbing them to break it up. funny. but it sorta ruined the illustration when i had to let him know it was fake.
this isn’t an illustration but a handout tragedy. spellcheck is great but doesn’t always catch what you miss. i had this on a handout i did a few weeks ago… “What are some things people worship?
Hoe do they worship them?” that’s not what i meant.
I had a very dramatic message going…I was simulating the weight of sin and I had a bunch of metal folding chairs placed over me the whole time I was doing the talk. the lights were dimmed, I was getting physically exhausted, the kids could feel the weight of the moment…then…one of my well meaning older sponsors saw a great teachable moment…turned on the lights and came running over and said “we should help carry one anothers burdens” and started to remove the chairs from me and put them on him…needless to say, the moment was lost.
I can relate to Brandi’s story.
I did the same illustration one night except I used the ugliest rock I could find. I had taped the back of the mirror with duct tape of course to keep the shards of glass from spraying the audience. As I was explaining how Satan wanted to shatter our image I threw the rock apparently much harder than I had anticipated. The rock went completely through the mirror and then through the wall behind it leaving a huge hole in the wall. The first thing I heard was “he just knocked a hole in the wall”.
I managed to salvage the moment until this kid come up to me and said that the glass had hit him and he lifted his arm and there it was a piece of glass sticking in it. I sent him to my wife totally confused by how he got hit where he was sitting. Later two of my youth told me he stuck it in himself. I was relieved to know that I hadn’t hit him. We now refer to that boy as “glass stabber boy”.
The illustration still worked well after all that but some of the youth still remind me of the time I put the hole in the wall.
Lesson learned? No matter how much you prepare just expect the unexpected and be ready to improvise, improvise a lot if you need to.
I was speaking at a local chapel for a Christian school. First time there and was teaching on the power of forgiveness. I did a very basic object lesson with food coloring and bleach in a pitcher of water.
However, as I opened the coloring, it launched all over me, my hands, my clothes and the chapel carpet. Needless to say, the lesson of sin and forgiveness was lost in the chaos. Thankfully, it was a junior chapel and I was able to make a joke about it and spent the rest of the time teaching with “blood” stained hands and clothes.
They did actually invite me back, but the blood stains on the carpet are there forever.
At one point in time, we had a junior high ministry that met at a gym. One week, we were emphasizing teamwork, so we used plastic wrap to unite the kids together. They were supposed to go through a semi-obstacle course. We knew that there was a degree of risk for them to fall and one kid did and took the whole group of about 8 of them down. They couldn’t get back up on their feet and their attempts caused the wrap to bundle up into a rope, so we needed to cut them loose to prevent injuries.
Another time, we tried to setup an outdoor obstacle course in which teams competed to cross a minefield of water balloons set to explode. We had members blind folded and a partner guiding them through. The hope was to illustrate how we need to depend on God for direction in life. We had it all hyped up, but for whatever reason (probably because they weren’t inflated to their maximum potential), the water balloons never popped like they should have – even when kids were getting caught up in them (since we turned it into a race). Instead, I think I ended up getting soaked later that night.
After this and a few less extravagant examples, you learn to try and practice things before you actually do them. So there was this other time that I was going to try and do an elementary illustration on how Christ’s blood cleanses us. I didn’t want to work with bleach to avoid the issue that Mike had, so I tried a product on the market that’s supposed to remove stains from clothing. Needless to say after buying the stuff, I couldn’t get the the stains out…didn’t work like how they illustrate it on television! So, I had to get creative and come up with a new idea. Fortunately, this happened as I prepared on my own rather than in front of them all.
For a lock-in we played Jell-O games and one of them was called Human Jell-O maker. The kids were supposed to eat Koolade powder, and then drink a cup of warm water and a cup of cold water and then jump rope 10 times to mix it up. 3/4 of the the kids ended up throwing up because the I gave them too much Koolade powder and it was so strong and sour. We spent the next hour soaking shirts, a white table cloth and getting Koolade stains out of the carpet.