Ignite - Youth Club

Ignite Youth Club

River City Church. 87 - 89 Irish Street. Each Friday night. 7 - 8.30pm. 12-18yrs. 

Games, Live Music, Bible studies, Small Groups and much more

“Ignite” is the youth work of River City Church and caters for youth from secondary school age onwards. The club runs each Friday night and centres around small group teaching and discussions on life issues from a Biblical perspective.

As with Club Lighthouse, the team running this ministry are young adults who themselves have come to faith in Christ through such youth ministry. They are well aware of the pressures that our image obsessed culture is bringing on teenagers. Behind all the music and the appearance of ‘cool’, there hides a generation searching for identity, security and significance in their lives. In an age of information technology, where young people have never had more access to knowledge, the truth that they search for remains that which each past generation has sought; “Who am I? Is there a purpose to this life? What will happen to me?

Each person or society that is deprived of these foundation stones of truth, will instead try to build their lives on the shifting sands of materialism.

The truth that the Bible declares is that man was built to worship and to believe. We cannot help believing as we cannot help breathing. G K Chesterton famously summed up this truth by observing, “When people stop believing in God they don’t start believing in nothing, they believe in anything”. To live only for the pleasure of our natural senses is to worship created things rather than the creator, and the result is to live a life that is dead to the reality of God. The consequences for a society that does not seek God are always the same, which is why you can read a description of our Western ‘advanced’ society in words written 2000 years ago. (Romans 1.v16-22)

Spiritual principles remain unaffected by advances in technology or changes in scientific theories. One of the most basic is found in Galatians 6.v7,8 “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.”

In other words, each of us is the product of what we have believed. To try and help a generation of youth being bombarded by every temptation to selfishness and offered every shortcut to bliss will take more than better education. Year by year improvements in ‘education’ are only producing educated fools if such education deprives young minds of their greatest need; to know the truth about life.

The power of the gospel to change young lives in clubs such as Ignite comes through the revelation that Truth is not a philosophy to be learned or a religion to be believed but a person to be loved and loved by.

No amount of study can replace the power of an encounter with He who is Truth, Jesus Christ. Only an encounter with love that is totally selfless can set people free from their own self-centredness. The biggest problem in the society that our young people are growing up in, has always been one that governments have been unable to tackle, for how do you treat an epidemic of selfishness and how can you set a people free from the pain and hurt of their past?

Read how Jesus did in Luke 5. v17-26 and you will understand the vision behind Ignite.

The condition that has left us all crippled by selfishness is our separation from God. Jesus is the only one who has the answer to the most destructive disease in the world; sin. The work of the Church, through such ministries as Ignite, is simply to lovingly carry people, through prayer and service into the presence of Christ, so that He can heal them and they too can rise up glorifying God.