To celebrate our 30th anniversary, we’re telling 30 stories of God’s faithfulness in and through Fellowship North. You can read all the stories here.
In the summer of 1997, after my first couple of years on staff, we took a middle-school backpacking trip to Colorado. In preparation for the trip, we went through Craig’s “Be A Player” curriculum, which he prepared as a part of his doctoral program. “Be A Player” was supposed to help people learn how to share the Gospel with their friends – to just be comfortable doing it. Not weird. It worked great with those middle-school students.
Then we went on this trip, and like all backpacking trips, it stretched the kids some. We kept talking about what it meant to invite people in the whole time we were gone. And then we came home.
By this point, the whole church was working through “Be A Player” on Sunday mornings. It was almost time for school to start, and Craig challenged us to pick 3 people, pray for them, and then invite them to church. I’ll never forget Amy & Erin McGhee coming up to me and saying, “Ok, we’ve got our three. Now what?” I was blown away; they were just about to start 8th grade.
We had a big, messy event to kick off the school year. We called it Muckfest and a bunch of kids came and threw food at each other and smeared Crisco in each other’s hair. Some of those kids were the very ones that our middle school kids had prayed for that summer.
One of those kids was Bobby Harrison.
I look around Fellowship North now and I see many of those kids, all grown up – the result of God working through the people here to invite other people in. I’ve always loved how much this church has invested in the lives of teenagers.
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Today’s story is by Bryan Jones.
Bryan really wants to be a luchador when he grows up, but in the meantime he works as the Digital Director at Eric, Rob, and Isaac, Inc. He’s married to Sarabeth and they have 3 kids: Elizabeth, Jonathan, and Will. He still works with middle school kids as a volunteer with Elevate at FN.