The scoreboard didn’t tell the whole story Sept. 15 in Satsuma. The visiting Daphne Trojans hung 45 heavy points on the home team, keeping hope far from the minds of Satsuma Gator fans and excitement far from the gridiron for four quarters.
“Daphne slaughtered us. It was bad,” said Joey Bentley, associate pastor of students and seniors for First Baptist Church, Satsuma.
In the fifth quarter, though, things got interesting.
Following the end of regulation play, more than 500 students crowded the tennis courts on the Satsuma High School campus for a fifth quarter event sponsored by the school’s chapter of First Priority, a Christian club in middle and high schools across Alabama. Featuring bands, free food and even rock-wall climbing, the event was organized by the North Mobile County Area Network of Churches and Youth Pastors, a collaboration of youth ministers from four churches in Mobile Baptist Association.
Started in 2003, the organization — currently comprised of Bayou Sara, Saraland; First, North Mobile, in Saraland; First, Satsuma; and Lafitte, Saraland — is the brainchild of John Blackwell, minister to students for Bayou Sara Baptist, and Brent Allen, director of southwest Alabama for First Priority.
“For a while, it was just John and myself. We had some churches involved, but we had some turnover and it would sometimes just be us hanging out by ourselves,” Allen said. “A lot of the youth ministers in the area really didn’t see the necessity of it, but we had some new ones come in who really saw the vision of the network. We’ve really begun to see some tremendous things, just really trying to build some camraderie.”
While growing in the quality of fellowship, Allen, Blackwell and Bentley maintain that the network’s function is mostly evangelistic. The fifth quarter event was the second of five such evangelistic events the network has planned to correspond with Satsuma home games throughout football season. The first event was held at First, North Mobile; the remainder will rotate among the network’s member churches.
“[The Sept. 15 event] being at the school, we couldn’t give an official invitation, but we did share the gospel,” Blackwell said. “We just simply stated that if anyone would like to talk to someone, we had counselors on hand. We pointed them out to the students, and we know for a fact that two kids accepted Christ.”
Then Sept. 27, a network-organized See You At The Pole rally drew more than 300 to Bayou Sara, and the number of commitments grew to 50.
“What’s really neat is seeing what can happen when you get some youth ministers working together,” Blackwell said. The number of students that have attended the events is “huge for our area,” he added.
Bentley agreed. “We each have our own thing; we’re reaching kids but we know we don’t have the areawide evangelistic success that we can have when we get together.”
Bentley’s attitude is refreshing, said Allen, who recognizes that there is always potential for youth groups of neighboring churches to slip into competitive modes, often trying to “out-reach” each other in terms of outreach.
“You’ve got to get youth ministers together to break down those walls and realize we’re all one body,” he said.
And the body in north Mobile is growing.
“We’ve got a huge thing in March, a DiscipleNow plus some missions work where we could easily be expecting 500 kids … it’s just a sign of God really blessing the effort and honoring the effort,” Blackwell said.
Though all four member churches are Baptist, Blackwell and company don’t want to limit the network’s success with denominational strictures.
“Our desire isn’t just to make it a Baptist thing. Our goal is to ultimately spread it to other churches and areas and maybe even inspire others to do something similar,” he said.
Mobile-area churches offer students post-football game fun
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