Should Youth Group Games Be Cancelled?

From pies in the face to eating gross food, why so many evangelical youth groups rely on embarrassment and humiliation to introduce kids to Jesus? Esau's hill to die shares why he canceled shame-based games in his own youth ministry—and what he replaced them with. The conversation explores cultural differences, the importance of emotional safety, and what it really means to create spaces where young people can open up and encounter Christ.

("My Hill to Die On" is a Holy Post Plus-exclusive series. Find the full youth group games discussion on holypost.com/plus!)

Esau: My hill to die on or a strong take is that most youth group games are bad. Now let me explain, let me explain. So I grew up in a black church context, we didn't even have a youth group. And my first time ever in a kind of evangelical youth group setting.

 At the end of the game, the person who lost got like a pie in the face. And I was shocked because in my neighborhood, if you put a pie in somebody's face, you're going to get beat up. And the more I hung out with evangelical youth groups, I realized that most of them have some kind of weird, embarrassing element of it.

You eat a weird food, you're getting hit with something or you're getting embarrassed in some way. And so I just don't understand how or why you have to embarrass or spill something on a kid to introduce them to Jesus. 

My hot take is, cancel youth group games for the kids. No shame involved. No shame. It is a distinctively evangelical phenomenon to embarrass people for entertainment in the context of childhood activities.  

Skye: Okay, so when you led the youth group and you discovered that these things were happening, did you just go in there and become the killjoy and say “enough with the games!”

Esau: Yeah. What I did instead is we just did High Point, Low Point. We went around and said what was the best part of your day and what was the worst part of your day, and you'll be surprised at how rarely young people are actually asked about their day.

That became one of the most important parts. They would not let me get rid of it. We did that every week for almost three years. In the youth group, I'm not saying correlation is causation, but we got rid of the games, no more pie in the face, and we added in “let me actually get to know you and tell you about Jesus.”

Skye: So you exchanged humiliation for vulnerability? 

Kaitlyn: That sounds very nice. I cannot believe I am the one saying this because I am sure I hated these games when I was in youth group, but like, you need some more levity! You need some, like, just goofiness. 

Esau: We have fun. I don't want to say we never played any games. There might have been Foursquare, I feel like there was some game involving football, so it wasn't that we didn't play. It was just like, there were no shame-based activities.

Kaitlyn: Does that include all eating gross things? Because that seems pretty central to youth group. 

Esau: Yeah, no. No eating gross stuff. No eating gross stuff. Now that I think back on it, there were a couple of OG youth group leaders who would bring back some of the gross stuff. 

Skye: I understand like if you are forcing some poor shy kid into an embarrassing situation, that's bad, but when you are volunteering, and there's always that kid who wants to do that, it's just a way for everyone to have a shared goofy fun. I mean like, we've had a lot of people connected to Holy Post and in our office, even, who were involved with Young Life. And like, this is a staple, right? But they never shame a kid into doing something- it's always a volunteer. 

Esau: I think a lot of that is culturally conditioned. During the entirety of my childhood, we did not have these types of games. We played basketball, we played baseball, we played spades. In the context of playing spades, did you talk trash to each other? Yes. So there were times where there was the frivolity of Like the competition, but it came naturally as a part of the activity, vs. the object of the game is to like, hit you in the pot of the face, like I’ve dunked on you like you deserve it.

Skye: The other question is, are these games problematic in your mind because they're connected to a ministry, or in any context would this be bad?

Esau: I'm fundamentally opposed to these types of games in general. Because, I don't want to make my neighborhood sound too violent or dangerous, but where I grew up, a lot of our context was emotional management. And so if you're going to have a bunch of kids together, especially from different neighborhoods, you have to figure out how to do something that’s not going to turn violent.

And so you were trying to have a good time together and you hoped that while you're playing basketball, nobody got fouled in a way that was too physical because then that would lead to something else. So in other words, there was a sense of always managing the emotions in a room and not singling someone out, because if you singled them out, that was going to lead to danger. So when you have a game that is set up to single people out, it just feels odd.

Skye: I get it. This went from a hill to die on to like an interesting sociographic understanding of  humiliating youth games.  

Esau: I think that when you talk about how place influences how you see and understand and respond to stuff, that cultural difference goes all the way down. And I don't think we always take that seriously enough, like how far down it goes. 

Skye: Great point. ​