Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and with it the start of holiday meals: the turkey. There’s something special about seeing a perfectly cooked Thanksgiving turkey sitting on the table, but this holiday season the turkey can be so much more. Here are 5 ways that you can use a turkey in your student ministry for some Thanksgiving fun.
- Go Bowling – Keep the turkey frozen, set up some awesome pins using that canned cranberry sauce, and bowl away! Make sure that the surface you’re bowling on is one where the frozen turkey can slide easily.
- Ultimate Turkey – Play the standard game of Ultimate, but replace the frisbee with a thawed turkey. Make sure the thing is thawed. No one wants a broken nose because you decided to use a frozen turkey here. Also, for your Thanksgiving dinner you may like to go for the big 24 pound bruiser of a turkey. This is not the time for that. Choose a reasonably sized turkey that your students will be able to throw.
- Distance competition – Whether you throw it like a shotput, javelin, or slide it as far as you can, the turkey distance competition is a classic winner.
- Thanksgiving Obstacle Course – Design a multiple stage obstacle course featuring Thanksgiving food items (or Thanksgiving themed stuff in general) as the “obstacles” or challenges. Divide your students into teams and have different students within each team take on the obstacles. It’s also good to have a few team-wide obstacles to get everyone involved. Here are some examples of obstacles: eat a can of cranberry sauce, dig through gravy to find something, take a pumpkin pie to the face, make a mashed potato sculpture, and so on. Be creative here and have some fun with it. Finally, the star of the show: the turkey. Use it as the baton that is carried throughout the whole race. Coat it liberally in crisco or oil so that it’s slippery and difficult to carry. Make sure that students have to pass it between obstacles and end the race with a re-oiling and your classic game of over under passing the turkey through the whole team.
- Eat it – This time of year provides a great opportunity for you to gather with your volunteer leaders and share a meal with them. Spend some time to celebrate what God has done over the last year and to strengthen the relationships you have with this group of leaders. In any church, student ministry doesn’t happen to maximum effectiveness without a solid group of volunteer leaders. Use this season to recharge and encourage them to keep investing in the new year.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
This post was written by Ben Trueblood, Director of Lifeway Student Ministry
