Wired Ministries 2015 has Kicked Off with a Running Start

Matt Boster

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Posted by: Matt Boster
Date: Jun 23 2015 11:22 AM

DOTHAN: In 2005, Bro. Jerry Grandstaff, the Director of Missions for the Columbia Baptist Association, challenged a group of local student ministers with the concept of having an evangelistic event for our community that would be student led.  Several ideas were floated regarding the purpose and mission of the event, and we looked at several different options that included week long and weekend crusade options. A large group of local student ministers met with the Scott Dawson Evangelistic Association about the possibility of bringing Pathfinders into our community for a week during the summer of 2008.  However, after about a year of meeting with them, we didn’t feel as if that was the direction God was leading us.

Throughout the process, we continued to ask ourselves this question: If we are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to take our student ministries all over the country and world to do mission work, why can’t we do a mission camp in our own area to expose our students to the needs within our own community?  As student pastors, we had been exposed to all types of summer mission opportunities like M-Fuge, Pathfinders, Student Life and World Changers.  Since we were trying to create a mission’s week format that would allow us to accomplish our goals within the limited facilities and resources we had to work with, our student ministers were able to build a missions week model based upon the different features we liked about the existing mission events we had attended in the past.

Due to our lack of an associational conference center, we decided to take on the World Changers model and house our participants at local churches that would be responsible for the lodging and meals for the students staying at their facilities.  Fortunately, it worked out that one of the churches that were used for lodging could also be used for small group meetings along with our praise and worship services.  Because we wanted to design our week to have an emphasis on both Bible study and mission work, we used the daily schedule format that is used by M-Fuge.  This allows us to have Bible study first thing in the morning, do mission work in the middle of the day, have a limited amount of free time in the afternoon and our praise and worship services at night.

We also used the Pathfinders and World Changers model of inviting people from the ministry sites we had been working at throughout the week to come to our closing worship service on Friday night.  However, we did not limit it to just those whom we ministered to that week, but also invited the entire community to come worship with us and participate in our closing celebration afterward.  This created the unique opportunity for friends, parents and other family members to come worship with their loved ones who participated in WIRED and get to see all God had done for us throughout the week.

This week they have an entire list of people they are going to help, I have picked three to do photos of, they are all in Dothan.

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