Evangelism of state’s youth under new leadership

The race is on to take the gospel to Alabama’s more than 400,000 unreached youth, and the forerunners in that effort recently handed off the baton to a new group of leaders.
   
Earlier this year, the office of collegiate and student ministries for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM) assumed the role of evangelizing the state’s youth. The responsibility was transferred from the office of evangelism. 
   
According to Mike Nuss, director of the office of collegiate and student ministries, the shift in responsibility allows the student ministries office to wed a need it discovered with the strategy to meet that need.
   
Nuss explained that the office had begun looking at the number of unsaved students in the state. 
   
According to numbers compiled by the SBOM, he said there are an estimated 600,000 seventh through 12th graders in Alabama. 
   
A little more than two-thirds of those have no personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Nuss said.
   
“The issue of great numbers of unreached students in the state was just alarming to us,” he said.
   
While his office was looking at a way to address that issue, the opportunity to take charge of youth evangelism — including the state’s Youth Evangelism Conference (YEC) — came along.
   
“We want to help churches fulfill the Great Commission by doing what they need to do in youth evangelism,” Nuss said. “We also felt [YEC] is the best venue to talk to Alabama Baptists and youth leaders about youth evangelism in the state.”
   
Although YEC has changed offices, the purpose of the event has not changed, he said. 
   
“YEC is a call to a personal relationship with Christ coupled with the challenge to be witnesses,” Nuss said. “It will not move away from the direction of using the event to stress the imperative of using students to reach their generation for Christ.”
   
The introduction of a youth evangelism emphasis called Connect is a way to equip students with a tool to fulfill that challenge, he said. Connect stresses the need for students to reach out to fellow students and helps them discover ways to do that (see story, this page).
   
Although the strategy is not new, YEC gives the SBOM a chance to inform the state’s churches, youth and youth leaders about it as a whole. “This event generates the largest gathering of Alabama Baptists in any calendar year,” he said, noting that last year’s attendance was 3,500.
   
He said the emphasis on Connect at YEC would last long enough to give Alabama Baptist churches a chance to implement it and see how it works for them. “We’re excited about the potential the event has to help youth understand ‘Hey, you need to be about reaching fellow students,’” Nuss said. 
   
The conference will also have a different look, necessitated by a change in venue. In years past, YEC was held at the Montgomery Civic Center. Construction forced organizers to look elsewhere, and they decided to hold YEC at The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham. “The style of that facility is conducive to a meeting like this,” he said. 
   
But because of the seating capacity and expected attendance, the conference will be split into two identical sessions to allow more youth to attend.
   
With construction in Montgomery lasting through next year, YEC will probably be held at Brook Hills again, Nuss said. 
   
The event, however, will try as soon as possible to move back to Montgomery’s central location to be “more equally accessible to all churches in the state.”