A few years ago, another church in my town brought in a new youth pastor. From the moment he arrived, he was committed to drawing other youth pastors and leaders in the community together. After about two years of meeting together regularly for fellowship, prayer, and occasional training, all of us felt like there was something new going on.
The vision God had given him was to have a community wide back-to-school event at one of the local high schools where a few of us had found favor. As a handful of churches began to meet to plan the event, we weren’t sure what God had in store. Nobody had ever planned an event like this. None of us had ever really worked together in this way before. We came from different church backgrounds and philosophies, but we knew that God desired for us to do this together.
We wanted our community to come together as “one” so that’s what we called the event, ONE. We wanted to be ONE community, at ONE event, with ONE prayer, from our ONE collective heart, to our ONE God.
On a Sunday afternoon, 2,000 students gathered in a public high school football stadium for ONE! Thirty-five different youth ministries gathered in that stadium to worship together. A mixed band of local high school students led the worship. A recent high school graduate, known as an influencer for Christ on his campus, spoke and inspired the students. And the students prayed and declared that they would enter their different schools on Monday united with a purpose to bring love and peace to their campuses in the name of Jesus.
That ONE event started because one youth worker was passionate about kingdom teamwork. He did the work of gathering us together and we believe the fruit of that will be seen in the schools of our community for years to come.