Calvary Chapel Oceanside's Massive Mall Hunt was tonight. The Massive Mall Hunt is an atypical scavenger hunt where instead of searching for objects, the kids sought out people. Members from the church, deacons, pastors, etc. volunteered to participate. Many were disguised in fun attire. Pastor Matt asked if I wanted to dress up, since I was chaperoning the big one so I opted not to be a "target" this year.
The big one invited a friend to join him and since there were just two of them, Pastor Abel, added other boys to their team so that each team would have a maximum of eight team members. Here's is Team Name, less one boy who came about 5 minutes late.
Each team was given this 14 page booklet
filled with 2 inch photos of the "targets". Teams had to walk the mall in search of their targets. Targets could be any place including inside shops and restaurants, the exception major department stores. Once a target was located the team had to approach the target and address them by their code name, listed in the booklet and if correct, the target would sign the book. Each target had a point value. At the end of the hunt, the team with the most points won.
I had thought the code names were along the lines of 007, James Bond, etc. Little did I know until after the Massive Mall Hunt, that the code names were quite unique. We'll get more into the code names later in this post.
We found one of the targets almost immediately. Pastor Rory was dressed as a Hasidic Jew. Given that the Massive Mall Hunt took place on a Friday night at 6:30pm this was an easy find.
Another easy find was Pico who was dressed as a woman. It took the boys a few extra minutes to realize that the blonde woman with Pico was Jon, who had also dressed as a woman. Unfortunately I don't have a photo since there were several other teams in the area and I didn't want to give these targets away.
The big one addressing a target by his code name.
Other targets weren't as easy and the boys would come away embarassed and red faced after addressing people by code names. I had attributed this to their age and being embarassed that they got the answer wrong. And one boy who walked away incredibly embarassed, I had thought his was because he had to approach a girl.
After the hunt there was a teaching and worship by one of the high school ministry's worship teams. Afterwards I was able to get the big one's team book and look through it. After reading the code names, the boys' embarassment made sense.
Here are few of the code names. (remember that the boys had to approach and address people they thought were targets by the following code names)
"I am Hannah Montana's biggest fan!"
"Excuse me, I have gas."
"Please take me with you!" (this was the code name for one of the teenage girls in the book and for whom one of the boys approached a stranger addressing them as such)
"My armpits smell like cheese."
And many more of the same plus a few non embarassing code names like:
"Hey, I am a Jesus lover too!"
"Do you know the good news about Jesus the Christ?"
"Do you love Jesus!"
All in all it was a fun time. I'm looking forward to next year. :)
