Past entries here have mentioned the connections I had with youth ministry, a call I never felt comfortable with, but a vocation made necessary by two things: 1) my radio audience was made up of youth (in the early years especially), and 2) my radio ministry didn’t generate enough income to support me full time. I’ve listed my various youth ministry “jobs” previously in this blog, so I needn’t go into much detail apart from telling two or three stories more or less related to “Celebration Rock” and real live youth.
First, there was the night I was caught with underage kids in the middle of the night and found myself in a police station. That got your attention, didn’t it?
“Celebration Rock” had its birth as a program called “Showcase” broadcast on WBBL, the radio station operated at that time by Richmond, Virginia’s Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church. It was the late 1970s and to supplement my media ministry’s meager income, I had agreed to work at Grace Covenant as a part-time pastor to youth. The problem was that I had no formal training in the field. I was also introverted, never was into athletics, and didn’t sing or play guitar. As I remember it, my responsibilities were primarily with the high school youth, and they were fine kids, most of them. They were patient with my efforts to build community, experience Christian fellowship together, and do the obligatory activities previous groups had done in the past. For example, I organized and led a ski trip. Never mind that I had never skied before. And I took several of the teenagers to the week-long Montreat Youth conference. It was one of the worst weeks of my life. (With some further therapy, maybe I’ll write about that sometime.)
One of the things most youth groups look forward to at least once a year is the “lock in.” That’s a night when teenagers go to church, get “locked in,” and get to stay up all night while making life miserable for the well-meaning adults who thought this was a good thing. Depending on the church’s facilities and resources, the kids may watch movies, play games, sneak around the church building in the dark, and eat junk food. There may be a spiritual component of some kind, but not always. The Bible study or devotional time isn’t nearly as engaging as the sneaking around the building in the dark part.
Being a very creative guy, I changed the rules the night we had scheduled the lock-in. I designed it to be a lock-out. It took a couple of weeks and a score of phone calls, plus a letter to parents explaining what we were going to do that summer night. Frankly, except for the police station episode, the idea was pure genius and I would recommend this idea to anyone doing youth ministry in a local church. Here was the plan:
We gathered at the church at 8 p.m., with the kids arriving with their permission slips in hand. We began with some “circle time,” during which I told them of the night’s itinerary. In a few minutes, we would lock ourselves out of the church building and spend the night on the streets of Richmond. Kind of. Actually, we would be making several stops to visit with people who worked nights. The first stop was the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper building downtown. We met with a reporter who took us to see the last “galley proofs” of the next morning’s edition. We talked with a photographer, too, and then went to the press room to see the papers printed and then bundled for delivery to the waiting trucks.
Next, we moved to what was then called the Medical College of Virginia Hospital, where we met with the night chaplain. He talked about his work there, but the most fascinating thing to me was the story he told about the day he first arrived at the hospital. Already hired, but not yet on site, he had been injured in an auto crash and arrived as a patient, not as a professional helper. He didn’t suggest that as a requirement for hospital chaplains, but it certainly set the tone for his ministry of empathy, compassion, and healing. The youth group was very impressed.
Also on the itinerary that night was a visit to a radio station. Since the kids knew me as the “rock and roll minister” I had asked the management of the stations where some of my programs were aired (WRVA and WRVQ) if we could stop by to talk with the over-night DJs, but we were turned down. Something about liability issues. Humbug. Q94 was the station most of the youth listened to in those days, and that was to be a highlight of their night out. But no. So I called WLEE (the fast fading AM rocker) and apparently they had no qualms about welcoming my youth group. I had had a long relationship with WLEE from the time “Showcase” started, so there was a firm level of trust there. The kids didn’t seem to mind at all that we weren’t going to the number one station in the city. And once we got into the WLEE studio, they learned that all there was to the station at night was one guy pushing buttons, cuing records, and logging his work. He also answered the phone and drank coffee. But it was as close as many of those kids came to show biz.
They almost didn’t make it to the radio station that night though. Because the stop just before that was to the local police station, the precinct house in the church’s neighborhood. When I designed this night on the streets, I had called the Richmond police department to alert them to our plans for this all-nighter. Because the church was in a downtown area where one might expect some crime in the middle of the night, I also inquired about whether a patrol car might cruise by and check on us once in awhile. Not likely, the officer told me. They apparently had enough to do with real police work without providing security for our roving band of church kids who were foolish enough to be walking through the Fan District at 2 a.m. Fair enough.
But I was able to add the Fan District police precinct to our list of places we’d stop that night. Between the hospital and the radio station, we dropped by the station house. There was one cop there when we arrived. “Ah, you’re the one who called,” he said as we walked through the door, I and the kids and one other adult adviser. “Yes, I’m Jeff Kellam, the youth pastor at Grace Covenant down the street.”
“Well, Rev. Kellam, I have some bad news for you.” Oh oh; this part of the tour has fallen through for some reason, I thought. Good grief! We’re going to have an extra hour on our hands. That what I was thinking, but not what the officer was saying.
“I hate to tell you this,” the policeman said. “I should have thought about this when you called, but…we have a curfew here in Richmond. These kids were supposed to be off the streets by midnight. Do any of the kids have their parents here?”
“No. But I have permission slips!”
“Permission slips may be OK for the church, but a judge won’t be impressed. Since you are the one in charge, I guess I have no alternative but to place you under arrest for contributing to the delinquency of these minors.”
To be continued…
