My husband and I have been on countless road trips with teenagers and youth groups and believe me when I say that your planning can make or break a trip. I can remember the day when we broken down on the side of the road and had to hang out at a McDonald’s for 6 very long hours waiting for someone to come pick us up. I can remember the time we thought we lost a teen. I can remember the trip where a young woman brought no clothing (I mean nothing) that followed the dress code. Later on in this Ministry Mondays series I will definitely be giving tips for planning a longer road trip with teens. But for now, here’s 10 tips for planning a short term road trip for your teen group:

1. Know who is coming. I know it’s really hard sometimes to get an absolute “yes” or an absolute “no” out of a teen when it comes to trips. But with a little diligence and a lot of insistence, you can get a basic idea of how many teens plan to make the trip within 3 weeks of the trip. I always add 2 to what seems to be my final number. About 90% of the time, we end up with at least 1 extra who wasn’t planning to go but suddenly can make it. You can’t make any plans for anything else before you have your basic gist number though.
2. Communicate with the parents. Quite often we’ve found that teens will commit to something long before they’ve asked their parents for permission. You don’t want to cause any friction between a parent and their child and you can help prevent trouble by communicating with the powers that be. Even something as simple as, “I believe your son/daughter wants to go on this upcoming trip to _________. Are you okay with them participating? This rings especially true for the teens who come without their parents to church. Their parents don’t get bulletins, they don’t hear announcements, and the papers you hand their children almost never make it into their hands.
3. Prepare your transport. How are you going to get where you’re going? Can you fit everyone into one vehicle? How much will gas cost for the trip? When planning for your transport, always anticipate having one person say “I’m coming” within 2 days of the trip. I’m not saying it always happens, but it sure does seem to happen most of the time. Have a backup plan if your first choice of transport doesn’t work out. Have a backup plan if more than one person extra shows up. It’s okay to play the What If game with your transport. For instance, what if the vehicle we’re planning to use breaks down right before the trip? What if the rental we planned gets double booked? What if my driver doesn’t show up or has a sudden illness? If you have an idea of how to fix your big what-if’s before the trip, you’ll be prepared when something happens.
4. Figure out the money. Sometimes, it’s hard to have an exact to-the-dollar amount for your trip. There are a lot of variables: housing costs, gas costs, rental costs all fluxuate. But you should still have a good idea of how much a trip will cost when you’re announcing the trip. It’s one of the first thing teens and parents will want to know. Once you know about how much you need, you can start fundraising! You shouldn’t plan more than one fundraiser for a church a month because it tends to make your giving folks apathetic towards need. Plan in advance to have enough fundraising involved to keep prices as low as possible. You never, ever want money to be what keeps a teen from going on a spiritually minded trip.
5. Pray it up. I put this one in the middle because it’s easy when you’re in the middle of planning your short term teen trip to forget to pray for the trip’s success. You want to see souls saved, you want relationships built, you want repentance and spiritual growth. After all, the purpose of any trip a church plans for its teenagers is going to be spiritual awakening and growth (even if it’s developing relationships at a theme park). Pray when you first decide to go to the trip, pray when you’re planning, and pray as you’re packing. Pray about physical things that could go wrong or prevent the best results; pray about attitudes and demeanors that will be joining you on the trip; pray about spiritual openness and that the conversation will lend itself for God to show up. Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray.
6. Sleep before the trip. I don’t know if you know this, but there is nothing quite as sleep-deprived as a chaperone on a teen trip. You know in advance that if you’re on a trip, you’re not going to get rest. And why would you want to? It’s late at night when your teens will suddenly start opening up and talking to you about things they really need to talk to you about. Forget sleep: focus on their needs. But knowing that you will be lacking sleep in the “during,” plan for extra sleep and extra rest leading into the trip so that your physical needs don’t outweigh the spiritual needs of your group there.
7. Have a list of what the teens need memorized. Know what the teens need to wear, know what they need to bring, and be ready to answer those two things again and again and again. Bring it up in passing, announce it from the pulpit, put it in the bulletin, hand them printouts of the list on a weekly basis, and you will [still] have a teen or their poor parent asking what they need to bring the night before. If you have it memorized, you’ll save time and frustration later on.
8. Pack the spares. You might be surprised by the needs of teens on a short term trip. I always pack extra pain medicine (tylenol, aleve, etc.), tampons or pads, an undershirt in the average size of my group memebers, a pillow, and a blanket. Everyone forgets something important sometime: it’s better to have the basic needs and be able to meet them than have to figure it out once you get where you’re going. It’ll save you and your teens lots of stress and distraction from the important stuff by having the spare needs available for them.
9. Speak assurance to parents of younger kids the day you leave. It’s hard to let your teen go away overnight especially if they’ve never done it before. Your parents will be nervous because their teen will be nervous. They made those kids from scratch and they are their most prized possessions: you are taking them to places they may have never visited before to experience things they may have never experienced before. It’s scary. So be assuring to your parents with younger kids: let your first timers know how to reach you, remind them the basics of your schedule, comfort them and say thank you for letting their kids come on the trip. They’re trusting you: assure them you’re trustworthy.
10. Tell the parents & the church what happened when you get back. Whenever you return from a teen trip (short or long), always talk to the parents about decisions that may have been made (good or bad) and if the church participated in any kind of fundraiser, get at least one teenager up in front to say thank you and to let the church know how God worked during the time you were gone. Teens get such a bad reputation for being ungrateful that anytime we can give them a good opportunity to show their gratitude, we should. It also helps with the fundraising for the next trip if the people who gave can remember a testimony of what their funds did for them through God’s help.

Enjoy your short term trip!

Love, Meghan