Can we use electric cymbals so we can turn them down?

The Fall season of ministry is a hard season, it is when we are trying to boost our numbers, we are trying new things, doing our competition series, games are fed steroids to make them more exciting, I tend to spend more time in preparation to ensure that excellence is a descriptive word that we are buddies with. And so far this Fall has been a blast, we are doing Mac v. PC for High School and Man v. Machine for Jr. High and bth are going well. We shot bean burritos out of water balloon launchers into a crowd of High Schoolers who had to catch them. It's fun stuff, but too often the meat of ministry is overlooked.

Here's what I mean, Youth Ministry is fun, we launch bean burritos, we play games on slip 'n slides and with shaving cream, the music is too loud, the students have too much energy and the hormones are all raging. Sometimes they don't pay for sodas, sometimes students are caught kissing, sometimes I want to kick them out because of the annoying self explanatory repetitive questions they ask, but all the time we put up with the baggage of ministry to show these students the love of Christ.

If we do all of these things, these crazy, fun, sometimes stupid things, and have not love, not for each other and not for Christ then we are a mere clanging cymbal. There are days when I have zero desire to go to the office, there are days when I don't want to be a creepy older guy on students campuses when I go to visit, there are times when I don't want to sacrifice another Friday Night to go to a football game, but I do it not because I am awesome but because God first loved me and I need to do my best to reflect that mirror at the people, and specifically the students around me.

Cheers.