Spencer Jones and Matt Dickey said everything that’s been happening with the students at First Baptist Church in Trussville has been all God. They say it definitely hasn’t had anything to do with their plans — which all fell apart.
“It’s kind of crazy how everything happened,” related Jones, FBC’s minister to high school students.
They had planned this year’s DiscipleNow weekend for Jan. 14–16 and picked a theme — Urgent. They lined up a speaker a year in advance. But a month and a half before the event, the speaker had to back out.
So they contacted Michael Catt, a revivalist and retired senior pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, asking him to step in. As they talked about their mutual passion for discipling students, Catt happened to mention that when his generation passed away, there would be nobody left who had experienced the Jesus Movement, a revival that started in the 1960s, continued into the ’70s and touched a generation.
Jones said they agreed they wanted to experience a student revival like that in their own day.
‘Part of a movement’
“We started thinking about changing our theme for our student ministry going forward,” he said. “We want to be a part of a movement of God like in the ’60s and ’70s, but more than that, like in Jesus’ time.”
Even though Catt also had to pull out of the weekend for health reasons, his influence stuck. Jones and Dickey, minister to middle school students, rebranded their DiscipleNow weekend and their student ministry as Jesus Mvmt.
And they started with prayer. A group of men began meeting every Tuesday morning to pray for God to move. Pastor Buddy Champion also did a sermon series on prayer to start the year, encouraging the congregation to pray that they would see a movement in their church and community.
“Everything was undergirded in prayer,” Dickey said.
Then he and Jones collected videos of leaders from all over the country — such as Ted Traylor, pastor of Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, and J. Kie Bowman, senior pastor of Hyde Park Baptist Church in Austin, Texas — who shared how the Jesus Movement impacted them in their younger years.
Then on the weekend itself, Jason Cook, senior pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, Georgia, and Caleb Waid, student ministries pastor at First Baptist Church Gardendale, stepped in and spoke Friday night and Saturday morning. Saturday evening, Dickey and Jones spoke and gave a gospel presentation.
“The Spirit — we’ve never been a part of anything like that,” Jones said. “Total we had 81 decisions for Christ. We know that wasn’t us. It was such a last-minute thing.”
Covered in prayer
The weekend had been covered in prayer, he noted. In addition to prayer leading up to it, people had been coming to the church and praying around the clock for the students that weekend.
Jones said the movement “wasn’t because of planning or lights or sound, it was strictly based upon prayer that all this has happened. We can’t emphasize enough that that’s critical.”
That Sunday morning, they baptized 44 students, with more baptisms planned.
Dickey said they’re just trying to be obedient and go where God is leading, and pray He will continue to use them in this season.
“There’s an excitement, a fire that’s been lit inside the students and we’re just trying to tend to that and hope it continues to spread,” he said.
Jones said it all goes back to seeing the Spirit move.
“We’re seeing God do some really cool things in the hearts and lives of our students.”
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