WV Hunter
Active member
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2009
- Messages
- 1,763
About 4 years ago my wife and I decided we wanted to offer the youth at our church something beside basketball. We are an inner city church on the "west side" of Charleston, WV. We had recently built a new gymnasium and wanted to take full advantage of it. My wife and I came up with a faith based archery program that uses the same equipment as the Archery in the Schools program, we call it "True Path Archery". We were running the program during the summers and drawing in 25 to 30 kids each week. In the winter we were doing the Upwards basketball program and drawing about the same participant numbers. This year we decided we would do archery in the winter instead of basketball.
The DNR contacted me last year and asked if they could use our facility to provide training to teachers for the Archery in the Schools program. In return they offered our church a handful of spots for certification if we were interested. Myself and 4 other church members took advantage of the training in order to give our own program a little more street cred. We advertised for a month leading up to the program and doubled up on bows, arrow curtains and targets expecting a crowd about double what we would normally have in the summer.
This past Saturday was our first session and we had 120 kids show up and register. Thankfully we were prepared. It was an awesome time and the kids loved. I have a feeling we will probably grow another 20 or 30 next week when some of the kids tell a friend about it.
The program is based off of the Archery in the Schools system but we add in a devotion and snack time for the kids. We will be splitting sessions this week to accomodate for parking and building capacity. A great problem to have when you are a church trying to grow your congregation to make up for the generation that is slowly dying off.
The DNR contacted me last year and asked if they could use our facility to provide training to teachers for the Archery in the Schools program. In return they offered our church a handful of spots for certification if we were interested. Myself and 4 other church members took advantage of the training in order to give our own program a little more street cred. We advertised for a month leading up to the program and doubled up on bows, arrow curtains and targets expecting a crowd about double what we would normally have in the summer.
This past Saturday was our first session and we had 120 kids show up and register. Thankfully we were prepared. It was an awesome time and the kids loved. I have a feeling we will probably grow another 20 or 30 next week when some of the kids tell a friend about it.
The program is based off of the Archery in the Schools system but we add in a devotion and snack time for the kids. We will be splitting sessions this week to accomodate for parking and building capacity. A great problem to have when you are a church trying to grow your congregation to make up for the generation that is slowly dying off.
