Writer: Shannon Jones
This year, Sean Vickers, minister of students at Boiling Springs First Baptist Church, wanted to take a creative approach to True Love Waits, the sexual-abstinence-until-marriage emphasis for teenagers.
Amanda Vickers and her friend Carla Jackson go public with their TLW commitment.Wanting to make the series fresh and challenging, he came up with an idea for students to go public with their purity pledges, and he decided to use the popularity of Facebook in order to do so.
During the month of February, he asked students to sign a True Love Waits commitment card, then have their photo taken while holding a sign that read, “I Am True Love Waits.” In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, students had their pictures made against a red background.
The pictures were uploaded to the group’s Facebook page, and each student was individually “tagged” in the photos. The students were also challenged to make the photo their profile picture on their individual Facebook pages for the entire month.
“In today’s society, what their Facebook profile represents is very important to them,” said Vickers, “and many students followed the whole process.”
Some students who had not attended church in a while saw their friends’ profile pictures, and they came to church to have their pictures taken and attend the series, Vickers said.
Feedback from parents has been positive, he said. “It has actually led to good conversations between parents and their children,” he added.
Vickers, who has been at Boiling Springs for a year and a half, has been a student minister for 14 years, and every year he utilizes True Love Waits. In taking the emphasis public this year, he received approval from co-founders Richard Ross and Jimmy Hester.
In an e-mail, Ross said the idea to incorporate Facebook was “warm, personal, courageous and contemporary.” Hester, a Greenville native and senior student ministry publishing coordinator at LifeWay Christian Resources, called it a “fantastic idea” and published the concept on the official True Love Waits blog. Vickers tries to encourage students to stay strong in their pledge. “I tell them that I believe in them, and they can honor God in this area of their life,” he said. “They don’t have to be like everybody else; they can be separate and have victory.”
By going public with True Love Waits, Vickers said, “We hope to change the climate of our community as students commit this area of their lives to God and lead the way for other students to follow.”
– Jones is a senior journalism student at North Greenville University and is serving as an intern at the Courier.