How To Keep Your Youth Group Clean - Junior High Ministry

How to Keep Your Youth Room from Getting Trashed

I had the opportunity to visit a friend’s youth ministry a few weeks ago, and although the teaching and the small groups were rock solid, I’ve got to tell you about the one thing that stuck out in my mind.

That was the nastiest youth room I’ve ever seen in my life.

In fact, I’m sad to report that at least half of all of the youth rooms I’ve seen fall somewhere between toxic or just plain gross.

And I know it’s tempting to think that those are the details that just don’t matter, but they do, and I’ll try to convince you with two quick stories.

One friend was finally convinced to clean up the mess after his ministry got hit with $800 in fumigation charges to take care of an out-of-control bug population. The culprits? Half-empty soda cans, pizza crusts, and Skittles.

Another found his inner-clean freak when a deviant prankster left some pornographic magazines in the youth room, beneath some other discarded papers.

Imagine the surprise of parents when they were discovered a few weeks later…

…and the disappointment of the youth worker when he realized the whole thing could have been prevented if he’d picked up the trash.

Messy rooms fail to instill confidence in parents and volunteers, they can be massively distracting to students, and in at least a few cases, they can become actual health hazards.

Here’s how it happened in our ministry.

Every Wednesday night, our Fellowship Hall was trashed. It was a constant frustration, because that typically meant an hour of cleaning; after a long day, and long after I wanted to go home and go to sleep.

A volunteer suggested that I choose one week to take our sanctuary-time; and explain to students why it was so important that they not leave a mess. You know, instead of talking about Jesus.

Well, I wasn’t going to do that. No way I was going to talk about cleaning up instead of talking about Christ. I decided there had to be a better way. And there was.

Today, our students almost never leave messes, and all it took was a few very simple steps to get there. The same can happen in your youth ministry.

Here’s how to keep your youth room from getting trashed:

You need more trashcans than you currently have.

If students can see and easily get to a trashcan, they’ll throw their trash away; but if they’re not sure where a trashcan is, they certainly won’t go out of their way to find one.

Most youth rooms have one trashcan. Sometimes it’s already overflowing.

In Disney World, the trashcans are never more than 30 steps apart (a detail that Walt Disney studied and insisted on himself!) and they’re always in predictable locations. In your youth room, there might be one near the back door or near the food serving line.

Buy a few more trashcans, and keep them near the place where people finish their food, not where they receive it.

(And please, if you’re putting one of those toppers on a trashcan, make sure that your styrofoam plates can actually fit through.)

Create a few spill buckets.

I used to get so upset with students that would spill soda on a table and just leave it there. After all, how hard is it to get a rag, some soapy water, and clean it up?

Then it hit me. They have no idea where the rags or the dish soap are. Fill two buckets with warm water, dish soap, and a few rags. Place them conspicuously (maybe near your trashcans!) and – voila! – they clean up their own little messes.

Don’t give students things that create terrible messes.

Your couches are filled with a metric ton of forgotten Skittles? Listen, there’s no way to guarantee that Skittles don’t slip out of a person’s hand, and even less of a guarantee that an enterprising young person would ever find them.

If you have a few items that are consistently causing the biggest problems, replace them or get rid of them altogether. You’ll thank me for that later.

Eliminate empty horizontal spaces.

Empty bookshelves, counter tops, coffee tables. If you leave unfilled horizontal surfaces in a gathering space, they will become trashcans. But when they’re filled with useful stuff or eliminated altogether? People find real trashcans.

There you go, four quick and easy ways to keep your youth room a little cleaner, and in a lot less of your time, so that you have more time and energy to make sure that sharing Christ is your top priority.

Like this blog post? Then you will love this one from Aaron – Why You’re a Bad Small Group Leader

Aaron Helman is on a mission to end youth worker burnout by providing the training and resources that you haven’t been taught… until now. Smarter Youth Ministry exists to help you learn how to manage their time and resources better so that you can do more ministry with less frustration. All of that having been said, you most likely know him as the creator of “Lamentation or Taylor Swift Lyric.”