Our Reach Beyond Radiate
As the leadership of our church sat down in August of 2022 to discuss our church’s future vision, a portion of our discussion revolved around children’s and youth ministries. We knew that going forward we wanted to continue our long history of reaching children and youth in our area with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But we also contemplated if there was anything we were missing that might add Kingdom value to our current ministries.
From that discussion is where the SRBC Grad to Growth Connector(s) idea started. Now, you might be wondering, what in the world is a Grad to Growth Connector? Simply put, we want to use the relationships and spiritual investment that we’ve made in our church and youth group students throughout M.S. & H.S. to maintain a relationship with these students through prayer, care, and connection after High School.
Kara Powell of the Fuller Youth Institute (www.stickyfaith.org) estimates that 40 percent of Christian students do not get connected to Christian community while in college. Certainly, we know that Christian community is vital to spiritual growth, especially in a college setting. During that first month of college, students have ample opportunities to fill their schedules. Everything is new: people, buildings, classes, mealtimes, etc. Many of our new college students are navigating these daily activities on their own for the first time. It can become easy to put worship and “Bible study” on the back burner.
This past year we had a goal to find a volunteer (or multiple) to help oversee this new focus. Thankfully, Joe & Carrie Simon (long-time and current H.S. Radiate leaders) were interested! Our current focus is getting college addresses updated with good contact info for them. We are trying to be strategic by focusing most of our effort around students who graduated H.S. within the past 2 years (not limited to this in the long term). Ultimately, we want to see our students get connected to ministries in their new locations. We hope to provide a caring, connection point from SRBC at least once a semester to check in on how students are doing, get any prayer requests they may have, and pray for them. We want these students to know that their church is behind them in their future endeavors.
Throughout the year, we have a couple of ways you can get involved in this ministry as well. We will be reaching out to our students with care packages, and we will have a need to help supply, pack, and send those. We also have opportunities for you to be on a prayer team for individual students. If you’d like to get connected to either of these opportunities to bless college students, please reach out to Carrie Simon (carrie.simon@a-pcsd.net) or myself (bryce@stemaboatbapstist.org). And thanks for being a church who invests in the next generation- children, youth, and college-age!
