When the student ministry of First Baptist Church Trussville threw a party, 739 middle- through high-school kids showed up — and so did God.
FBC’s fifth annual Disciple Now weekend, Jan. 12–14, resulted in 32 decisions for Christ and 21 baptisms.
Fresh from the Passion 2024 conference, singer/songwriter Sean Curran led worship, while Nate Hilgenkamp, podcaster and teaching and community pastor at Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, was featured speaker.
“We try to make sure things are done with excellence,” noted Spencer Jones, FBC’s minister to high school students. “In this world we live in, you’ve got to be able to capture their attention. It needs to be well done to keep them engaged, and we’re very fortunate to be able to bring people like Sean and Nate to speak into our students’ lives.”
Fun and worship
The weekend mix of fun and worship attracted students already involved at FBC, but DNow also is designed to reach out to those who don’t have a church or don’t attend on a regular basis.
The biggest key to the outreach effort is inspiring FBC students to buy into the idea of inviting their unchurched friends. And that, Jones said, calls for sometimes drastic measures in the form of challenges he and Matt Dickey, minister to middle school students, issue. They promise to do something outrageous in exchange for a certain number of non-FBC participants.
Fortunately — or perhaps unfortunately for the ministers — the students respond well to the challenges, so Jones and Dickey pay the price by submitting to things like leg-waxing and spray tans, taking the ACT test with their students, getting (temporary) tattoos depicting FBC Pastor Buddy Champion or traveling from Atlanta to Anniston on bicycles.
“The challenges give them fun reasons to reach out to their friends, which helps get those friends plugged into a church, whether here or somewhere else,” Dickey said.
Adding to the fun of FBC student events, one or more of Jones’ most prized possessions, a collection of mascot costumes, might make an appearance. It happened during this year’s DNow when the students attended a Hewitt-Trussville High School basketball game to show support for the school.
“Our students wore their Jesus Movement shirts and got to go to the game for free,” Jones recalled. “Then we did a halftime show in mascot costumes and everybody came onto the court to do ‘the church clap’ during halftime.
“The superintendent came up to us afterward and thanked us.”
Remembering
“Over the years DNow has grown significantly,” Jones noted. “We started back in 2020 with 317 students, and 17 kids accepted Jesus that weekend, and it’s gotten bigger each year. What’s really cool is that some of those kids who accepted Jesus at that first DNow are now our college leaders.”
This year’s theme, “Remember,” called attention to some of the remarkable things God has done for and through FBC students in the last five years. Messages reminded them of four things: Remember Who God Is, Remember Who We Are, Remember What God Has Done and Remember Why We Are Here.
“We’ve seen over 300 students saved and baptized, and God has moved in some really, really extraordinary ways,” Jones said. “So we wanted our students to remember that what we’ve seen is not normal. We attribute everything to prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Planning ahead
DNow is a year-round effort, so plans for 2025 began almost as soon as DNow 2024 was over.
“It takes a lot of planning and preparation to make sure that all the logistics are sorted out,” Jones noted. “But we have one of the best teams around, and everybody on it enjoys all the aspects that go into an incredible weekend like DNow.”
The “team” is a creative group of staff dedicated to student ministry who not only enjoy the work they do, but enjoy working together.
“Spencer and I are basically best friends, and a lot of our closest friends are in this place,” Dickey said. “So it helps that we’re all working with people we enjoy working with and can have fun with.”
In the end, though, the secret to FBC’s student ministry success can be expressed in three words: The Holy Spirit.
“We have parents behind us in everything we do, and we know we have the backing of our pastor and our ministry team,” Dickey affirmed,” but in the end, we know God is doing what only He can do. We can’t save our students and we can’t change their hearts — God’s the only One who can do that.
“But the things that we can do, we’re going to do with excellence, putting everything we can into it for the sake of reaching students, and relying on God to do what only He can do.”
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