Our annual Winter Retreat at our camp system was this weekend. We called it Engage: Philippians. Our goal was to present the letter of Philippians in a fresh, new, exciting and deeper way than our students have ever understood it. We had an incredible weekend!

This is typically a weekend focused on high school students. This year we opened it up to college-age students as well.

I’m not sure how successful we were. The weekend was a great success, sure. And if we’d focused on strictly high school students, it would have been a huge success. If we had geared it to only college-aged students, it would have been smaller, but still a great weekend.

I question whether or not it qualifies as a success since we expanded the age range. We knew going into this that we were attempting to tackle a broad range of students this way. We gave it a shot anyway.

The high school students I talked to loved the fact that we had college students there. They really connected well with the older students.

The college students I talked to were less enthused. They thought it was a great weekend, but not in the manner we planned. We wanted to create a weekend that would feed both groups. We got a weekend where the college students did as much leading as the youth leaders did. Not exactly what we planned. They felt that our planned events were a little “junior high-ish” for them to participate in as students. But as leaders, they jumped right in and led.

So in one way, we didn’t achieve our goal. And in another way, we enjoyed success in surprising ways. Interesting.

Here are a few other highlights from our weekend:

• Collide Worship Band rocked our sessions. They did a great job leading us into the presence of God.
• Dave Embree, of Christian Campus House, on Missouri State University, in Springfield, brought our messages from Philippians. We were all challenged to live more fully for Christ.
• We brought in Bill’s Extreme Paintball with their travelling lazer tag equipment. They brought their games to us. We played in our camp’s gym. It worked out better than we envisioned. 
• We had several students from Christian Campus House, from the Missouri State campus in West Plains attend. They were a great help.
• And we had an incredible crowd of high school students. We couldn’t have pulled this weekend off without them!

What successes or failures have you experienced trying to mingle high school and college ministry? Share your experiences in the comment section.