How to Celebrate Graduating Seniors in Your Youth Ministry

Ah, spring! Spring is the season of transition as everything dead is brought back to life. I love the sights, sounds, and smells of spring.  Spring reminds us baseball fans we'll soon have something to cheer about (unless you're a Red Sox fan. Jesus doesn't love the Red Sox).  Now that spring is in full swing, you will soon find your mailboxes full of graduation party invites as high school seniors celebrate their four-year accomplishment with lukewarm mostaccioli and stale cake in hopes of receiving a donation to their college tuition or gap year travels. And as the season of graduation parties is right around the corner, churches will prepare for how to best celebrate and prepare these young adults for this next phase of life. A few years ago, I had a couple volunteers who took our Senior Celebration Night to another level. Here’s what made this senior celebration night so special: 

Plan Ahead:

• Contact Families. A couple months before the event contact all seniors in your ministry and their parents and inform them about the details of the upcoming Senior Celebration Night.
  • RSVPs. Ask them if they would be attending that night, and how many people would be coming with them.
• Information. Ask the seniors, their parents, and your leadership team to provide you with the following information about their high school graduate:
  • Where did they go to high school?
  • What are their plans for next year? If a college, which college, and what are the school’s colors?
  • What small group were they in?
  • Were they particularly close to any of our ministry leaders?
• Pictures.
  • Ask the parents to send a few pictures including a baby picture, a family picture, and any pictures of their senior participating in youth ministry through the years.
  • Send your staff and volunteers a list of all seniors and ask them to locate a few pics of the seniors throughout their youth ministry years.
• Slideshow. Ask a team member to help put together a slideshow.
  • Yearbook. Create a yearbook with a page of information about each student, where they're going to college, and resources to help them in college. Include contact information for your adult leaders so they can stay in touch, Christian campus ministries at the schools they are attending, local churches, and websites and apps to help encourage their spiritual growth while in college.
• Affirming Voices. Assign one of your adult leaders, ideally someone who has spent a significant amount of time with each senior, to come up and share memories about them, positive things they've observed in their character, a verse, or words of encouragement to them as they left youth ministry and ventured forth.
• Invite the church. We always wanted our Senior Celebration Night to be more than just the families of the seniors. We invited all of our students, as well as extended an invitation to the church at large.
• Order gifts. We’ve done Bibles, devotionals, books, and CDs (back in the old days), etc.
• Purchase decorations and supplies. We would go to Party City and get graduation party decorations for the room and any needed supplies for the evening. If we knew where the graduates were going to college, we would also purchase balloons of the school colors and hang them by their pictures.
• Order food. We would have a general idea of headcount and then order a catered meal for the night

Prepare the Event:

• Have a team of students help set up and decorate the room.
• Hand out baby pictures with instructions for people to try and “guess that baby.”
• Set up food.
• Have your team of students serve food, wait on tables, etc.

Execute the Event:

• Opening. After opening comments and prayer, have everyone eat dinner.
• Commissioning. As the youth pastor, toward the end of dinner, share some thoughts with the seniors by way of a brief message to commission them into the future.
• Young Adult Ministry Introduction. Have representatives from your young adult ministry come and introduce themselves to the seniors and invite them to participate in their summer activities, and also to attend their ministry functions in the fall if they would still be living locally.
• Senior Spotlight After dinner, call each senior up one by one and have them sit in a chair. The leader who had been assigned to them would sit in another chair facing them, and share what they had prepared to say.
• Gift and Yearbook. Have the leader give them a gift bag which contained the gift we had purchased as well as the yearbook we had created before they returned to their seat.
• Slideshow. We would then play the slideshow reminiscing about the seniors and their involvement in student ministries.
• Closing Prayer. We would then either call all of the seniors forward or have them stand at their tables, and we would pray over them.
• Group Pictures. The seniors would pose as a group under the banner with their graduation year, and everyone would take pictures with them. We would then have our adult leaders join them for more photos

Clean up the Event:

• Ah yes, you thought it would all end happily ever after. But no, after every good celebration there is cleanup. Hey, somebody has to do it! Thank God for the younger students, and of course, it’s always a good idea to invite everyone to pitch in.
• After all of the hugs, seniors can take home their picture mats, balloons, etc.
• Encourage your leaders to continue to connect with their students, especially during their first year in college, via text or phone calls. Consider hosting a reunion for alumni during the summer. 

And there you have it, a comprehensive guide to host a memorable celebration for your graduating seniors!