I remember how the ride home from retreats or youth camps was almost the same every single time.
A bus full of teenagers who’d spent a weekend or week crying at the altar, writing letters to their future selves, promising God and each other they’d never go back to who they were before.
And then Monday came.
People rarely talked about Monday at camp. Unless it was to state emphatically everything would be different this time around.
And yet, when Monday came, the same friend group that got you in trouble was still your friend group. On Monday, the bedroom you’d promised God you’d clean out spiritually still had the same posters on the wall. On Monday, life was ordinary again and ordinary couldn’t continue the excitement that camp had built up.
By Wednesday night, most of us were already focused on when the next trip was.
Nobody in youth ministry ever really solved the problem. Some of them did talk about it and tried to. But mostly everyone just got better at planning the next mountaintop experience.
the crash wasn’t a bug in the system
Here’s the thing nobody said out loud back then and still almost nobody says out loud now.
The crash wasn’t a flaw in the system. The crash was the expected outcome.
A camp, a retreat, a worship night – all these things run on emotional highs. You pull people out of ordinary life, strip away distraction, turn up the volume, and the peak feels enormous precisely because everything around it was flattened first.
That’s not a spiritual phenomenon. That’s just how contrast works on a nervous system.
And it’s not evil.
God can absolutely meet someone in a mountaintop experience. He met Moses on one. But Moses came down the mountain and had to lead a people through forty years of wilderness that was not, in any way, a mountaintop.
Most of Scripture doesn’t happen on the mountain. Most of Scripture happens in the wilderness, in exile, in a boat, at a well, in a prison cell.
The mountaintop is rare on purpose. And yet we built entire youth ministries as if the mountaintop was the goal.
the church learned the same operating system
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that entire churches now run on the exact same operating system as the youth retreat format.
The worship set builds the same way. Slow song, quiet down, a moment of stillness engineered into the setlist, a swell, a peak, an altar call or a “response time” while the band plays underneath at exactly the right volume to keep the moment from breaking.
We didn’t invent this by accident. We learned it from youth events, and it worked, so we kept doing it – every Sunday, on a stage, for adults, using the same tactics made popular for teenagers at winter camp.
The church conference circuit definitely runs the same way as youth camps if you haven’t noticed. Three days, tight production, a lineup of speakers each building on the last, a closing time engineered to be the emotional peak of the whole conference.
People leave “changed.”
Well, for maybe about a weekend. Then Monday comes for adults too, the same way it did for teens.
we started confusing feeling with formation
We have to be honest about what got traded here.
We started measuring people’s spirituality by intensity instead of consistency.
We started treating the size of the feeling as evidence of the presence of God, instead of asking whether anything about a person’s actual life was different in six to nine months.
We started building whole churches around the producing of peak experiences, because peak experiences are exciting, and exciting things grow attendance, and attendance is what we decided to measure.
Have we mistaken a good cry at the altar for actual repentance?
Have we told people the mountaintop is where God lives, when Scripture keeps insisting He’s normally present in the valley?
Have we built spiritual lives that can only sustain themselves by getting out next hit at the next scheduled high?
building the muscle that actually holds
There’s now a vital shift churches have to make.
The primary rhythm of the church can’t be the retreat, the conference, the big upcoming sermon series, the month of prayer, or even the next important Sunday.
It has to be the ordinary week – the same small group of disciples meeting on the same Tuesday, month after month, with nothing building toward a climax. If that’s not the actual backbone of the church calendar, the mountaintop will keep being the focus.
It means teaching people to pray and read Scripture in a way that doesn’t need a worship set to be meaningful. A Christian that can only spend time in God’s presence with a band leading them hasn’t been taught to be with God at all.
It means creating different metrics on purpose – not “how did the retreat go,” but “who is still praying, still showing up, still being formed, six months later, with no event on the calendar.” If a church can’t answer that, it’s still living off the mountaintop.
And it means being honest from the stage that the high will fade. Saying it out loud before Mondaygets the chance to say it first, so people aren’t left thinking their faith failed when the feelings went away.
what actually holds up
The people I know who are still following Jesus decades after their own youth group years are almost never the ones who chased the next mountaintop the hardest.
They’re the ones who learned to pray in the midst of their ordinary lives and busy schedule.
Who kept showing up to a small, unglamorous group of people who knew them long after the retreat high wore off.
Who learned that faithfulness on Monday matters more than the tears on Friday night. Not because the tears were fake, but because the tears were never meant to be the point.
The mountaintop is real. God does meet us there.
But He doesn’t need us to meet Him there. He never has.
And a church that only knows how to build mountaintop experiences has never actually taught anyone how to walk in the ordinariness of life…which, it turns out, is where all of us actually live and Jesus wants to be the most present to us…
This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. The next post is “Find Your People.”
