One of our desires as a BCNet Evangelism Committee is to provide collegiate directors with ideas for evangelism on their campus. We have provided ideas in four categories: First Contact, Conversational Outreach, Community Integration, and Gospel Proclamation. We hope that the following Community Integration event will be useful to you and your students!
MATERIALS
The MANifesto event is specifically for guys. Our ministry at Chico State will hold a gender specific event about once a semester. This allows for guys to connect with other guys in a different way and also allows for a more physical event. The MANifesto is centered around football and ultimate frisbee games, with a video game tournament afterwards (and pizza of course). Feel free to get creative with it though; at our last MANifesto we incorporated “armless wrestling” and arm wrestling competitions.
Here is what you need:
- Cones (to make a field if you don’t have one available)
- Ultimate Frisbee Discs
- Footballs
- Coolers
- Water, Ice
- Football Flags (this is just in case, usually our ministry plays tackle)
- 4 TV’s
- 4 Xbox 360’s
- 4 copies of Halo/ Call of Duty/ some other multiplayer video game
- 4 ethernet cables and a modem to connect the xboxes together
PRIOR TO THE EVENT
Don’t be afraid to ask your student leaders to help host this event! We have students bring their TVs and Xboxes about 4-5 hours before the event to help set up the video game portion. We include them in making sure the videos games are hooked up correctly and we do a test run with them. Thirty minutes before the event starts, we meet up at the place where we will play football to set up the field for football and/or ultimate frisbee (depending on your group size). We choose a field that is as close to campus as possible so it’s easily accessible to students. Before the event starts and new students arrive, we pray with our student leaders for the event and guys that are coming.
DURING THE EVENT
When the event begins we explain the rules and clarify that we are at the event to have fun, not to hurt each other. If your group has a naturally over competitive bent, you might want to choose to play flag football and remind them that the purpose of the event is to befriend new students. Let water breaks be times to connect with students, get to know them and how school is going for them, but don’t let them go too long so as to keep the action going. An advantage to having the event at 2 different stations (one football, one video game) is giving rides to the second location becomes a time to get to know new students and set up a time to meet up again later to talk about your group! We also ask the students who come to bring $5 for pizza to help cover the cost, this ends up mostly being a free event! If they don’t bring money that’s ok. Then we send a staff member about 30 minutes ahead of when we play video games to go and grab the pizza and some soda and take it to the next location.
A FEW MORE IDEAS
Get some different colored cloth, cut them into strips, and use them form teams that they will keep for the whole event. It’s likely you will have to travel between where you play football and where you host the video game tournament, the bands help keep the teams consistent.
- We try to keep the video game as manly as possible. Usually we hook up 4 xbox 360s together to have 16 people play Halo together. Then we have people switch off.
- Again, this is a chance to be creative. What do guys like to do in your area? How can you incorporate that in your event?
- We incorporate a chalkboard to keep the score for the teams on how well they do at each event. We found that tapping into the competitive nature can make this more fun.
- To explain “armless wrestling,” it’s a little like sumo wrestling. Two people step into a ring (marked off with some kind of rope or drawn in sand), they place their arms behind their backs and try to push each other out of the ring without using their arms. First to step out of the ring or fall down (on their knees or otherwise) loses.
- We have done this event without the tournament as well and it was still a huge success so if the idea of coordinating the tournament sounds like a bit much, feel free to drop it.
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