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Thrive started in 1995 in a little house on the back 40 of Roger Bankson's property. When I say little I mean 450 sq/ft 1 bedroom 1 bathroom living room and kitchen! So SMALL! We had 4 guys, Pastor Rod Mock and his wife Stacy. So when we got our first girl, we knew we were rockin!! After growing to 5, everything kind of fell into place. The church was brand new so as it grew so did THRIVE. At that time we had no name officially. We had a contest and THE FLAME was picked! We kept that for a few years, moved to 9 different locations for our youth meetings and when we moved into our current location we changed the name to THRIVE! THRIVE Youth Ministrie is Victory Church in Apopka Florida's Youth Ministry. We believe that every young person has the potential to be determined, the strength to be decided, and the promise to be destined. THRIVE YOUTH providing an Awesome place for teenagers to get together every Wednesday night in Apopka FL with dynamic praise and worship! Relevant ministry and fun and entertaining, Crazy events that will keep you coming back for more! THRIVE'S Student Ministry is a ministry for Junior and Sr. High students. Our goal at THRIVE is to help students reach their full potential in Jesus Christ. Our relevant environment provides the perfect setting for spiritual and relational connections between students and God. We provide opportunities for growth in the Word, prayer, worship, evangelism, and ministry to people’s needs. We also have winter and summer camps, special events, and trips that impact the lives of young people. THRIVE MISSION: Youth ministry is an age-specific religious ministry and is the way in which a faith group, or other religious organization, engages with the young people who attend its place of worship, or live in its community. Youth ministry will usually encompass one or more of the following: POP CULTURE The name of the game in today’s pop culture is...“hyper-fragmentation.” Only a couple of decades ago songs, TV shows, movies, and events had a kind of “big net” impact—throw ’em out there and haul in your big catch of viewers and listeners. Today we live in a culture of micro-nets—almost all the big-net fishermen are gone. One example: Ever heard of “silent raves”? People in Europe and Canada have, where the networking phenomenon is common. It’s a new phenomenon in the U.S. Using Facebook’s power to create instant communities, organizers invite young people to congregate in large public spaces at a specific time with their MP3 players and headphones. Then, at a certain time, everyone turns on their music and dances sort-of, kind-of together. Each person dances to his or her own music, but they’re doing it together. Talk about a niche culture... SPITTING IN THE OCEAN In the ongoing debate between proponents of abstinence-only sex education in schools and those who favor, well, anything but that, one looming truth gets overlooked: The culture is now so sexualized that there’s evidence that all forms of sex education may be impotent. In a recent survey of college students at six schools, almost all the guys (86%) said they’d viewed pornographic material in the last year, and one out of five (20%) said they looked at porn “every” or “nearly every” day. And as if we didn’t have enough U.S.-produced porn, Japan’s erotic cultural imports are rapidly growing. “The appeal of Japanese pop culture [to Americans] is that it is a moral-free zone,” says Patrick Macias, editor of Otaku USA, in an MSNBC interview. “The ideas of good/bad, right/wrong...that duality is not present.” With the floodwaters of sexual influence pouring into the culture, sex education programs are treated like levees—they can hold back the water, but only so much of it. And the report card on abstinence-only programs is mixed. The anti-abstinence group Advocates for Youth studied the outcomes from 11 state-sponsored abstinence programs and summarized: “Evaluation of these 11 programs showed few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact.” As you might suspect, when you actually look at the results of these studies, rather than relying on an anti-abstinence gatekeeper, the picture looks a little brighter. The programs had marginal success—some could show measurable impact on kids’ willingness to abstain. One factor that everyone agrees on—parents are the key to kids’ sexual attitudes and behaviors, but more and more parents depend on schools to do the heavy lifting. The effect youth ministry has on this epidemic especially when coupled with parental support is greatly effective as well. In a USA Today interview, abstinence advocate Valerie Huber said: “You can’t expect that one class is going to undo all the misinformation teens are receiving...It needs to be reinforced, and parents should be the primary sex educators of their children.” music, or artists who can unify across generations, across race, across taste, across style.” By Rick Lawrence What I Learned from "Halo 3" KEEP TWEAKING - The designers at Bungie Studios have been tweaking HALO 3 for the past three years. They need to know "Does Halo 3 rock? Do people enjoy it, do they get a sense of speed and purpose?" When was the last time we asked students and/or leaders how we were doing as a student ministry? Sure we also want our ministry to "rock" so we must constantly "tweak" My WIRED MAGAZINE arrived in the mailbox. The cover story is "The Science of Play" interviewing the staff of Bungie who developed one of the most popular video games ever! As I read the article, I noticed a handful of similarities with student ministry and even a few inspirational ideas for the future... Bungie has hired one guy to lead a team to specifically "find flaws in Halo 3". WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON - Bungie doesn't just test its own games. It also buys copies of rival titles and studies those, too, to see how HALO matches up. When was the last time I went to visit another ministry in their element? Its been a long time. Sure, I could go to a conference and listen to THEIR report of how they do things but to actually see it all unfold in their environment would be helpful. CREATE AN EXPERIENCE - Bungie needs to create an experience that is challenging enough to thrill the 15 million existing hardcore fans of HALO-yet appealing enough to lure in millions of new players. So do we. We have many students who show up and we still need to engage them with new, creative, innovative ideas but at the same time-their is a whole new batch of students somewhere out there who need to be invited to the party. MULTIPLY YOUR TEAM - Bungie started off with 2 guys in Chicago in 1991. Today, over 100 staff members. As the ministry grows, so must out volunteer team too. THROW OUT WHAT DOESN'T WORK AND START OVER - Bungie threw out 80% of the work they had done on HALO 2 and started over. They only had a year and a half to reconstruct the entire game. For us, if it doesn't work throw it out. Maybe try to take another look at it from a different perspective, but if its a dead dog-then go bury it. NO REPEATS - Bungie is determined not to make the same mistakes they made with HALO 2. Learn from your mistakes and move on. WHAT IS YOUR IDENTITY? - Designers are committed to a 2 step process: First dream up new weapons, levels, and situations. Then monitor hundreds of people as they play the heck out of the game. Bungie knows who they are and what they want to accomplish. Too many of us in ministry try to be everything to everyone. Didn't the first church in Acts have that dilemma? The disciples just decided, "Hey, this is who we are and what we are going to do." I also want to dream up new weapons, levels, and situations too..... NEW IDEAS CAN BRING NEW UNEXPECTED PROBLEMS - A Halo Developer in the article talks about a new addition to the game will also inevitably cause unexpected problems. A particular gun becomes too powerful, a vehicle ends up making battled lopsided-and suddenly the game is less fun. What "particular gun" in our ministry is too powerful, what "vehicle is making ministry-battle lopsided"? STUDENTS NEED TO LEARN TO SELF-SUSTAIN - "Gamemakers have to devise a system of rules and equipment that gives players a few basic goals and then allows them to find their own ways of achieving those goals. The flow comes from constantly discovering innovative ways to solve these open-ended problems." I love that quote! We can't hold our students' hands every minute of the day. We must give them the basics to sustain on their own. No spoon-feeding. SOMETIMES STUDENTS GET CLEVER - "Then the tester got a clever idea." As the developers were testing the game, a tester came up with a new way to play that the developers didn't even notice. Sometimes students can bring a whole new idea to the table. After all, they are the ones we are trying to reach, right? Give them a listen. MORE WARTHOGS - "Designers hadn't put enough vehicles in the scene, and the A.I marines were taking them all before players realized they were supposed to hop aboard. The solution: More Warthogs." Student Ministry: More new ways of getting to our students so they can hop aboard. Text-messaging, emails, blogs, facebook, myspace, postcards, websites, whatever and however. SOLVE THE MYSTERY - Bungie wants to know why some Brutes are going AWOL in a later Jungle battle. We need to find out why 11th and 12th graders are checking out of church, period. DO BETTER - Wired Magazine ends the article with "Pagulayan, (Bungie staff member) wants do better." We should want that too. We should want to DO BETTER. There is much more at stake with our ministry than a high score.
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THRIVE YOUTH 509 S. Park Ave Apopka FL 32703 407.889.7288 X 202 YOUTHGUY@THRIVEONLINE.ORG |