Unique Conference bolsters W.O. teen's faith

WEST ORANGE — For Valentine’s Day weekend the past six years, Adrenaline and The Roots student ministries have collaborated on community service as part of the Unique Student Conference.

This year, about 70 middle- and high-school students from across West Orange performed various acts of service around the community on Feb. 14 and 15.

“On Saturday and Sunday, we take our students out for four to five hours of community service,” said Marcio Pacheco, youth pastor of Adrenaline Student Ministries at The Crossings Community Church and one of the organizers. “That’s wrapped around the sessions we created for them at Camp Wewa.”

Pacheco got a group from his brother’s church, Apopka Assembly, to join the Unique Student Conference this year at that camp in Apopka by Lake Apopka, where they created staging and much more to help students enjoy a weekend filled with a purpose, Pacheco said.

“It’s been awesome, and a lot of students really discover God in their lives and begin to serve the community,” he said.

The students performed many different tasks, including: cleaning up trash and repainting areas around the ninth-grade center at West Orange High School; assisting with the landscaping needs of Westbrooke Elementary School; and tending food gardens and housing projects at Matthew’s Hope to help impoverished and structurally challenged populations, Pacheco said.

The focus of the conference for six years has been for students to study how God uniquely created each of them, with past projects including home makeovers in Winter Garden, service for world health organizations and battered women and helping a large warehouse in Jacksonville to provide for the victims of poverty and earthquakes in Haiti. 

For some students, they had their first chance to contribute to the needs of others in their community in a way this meaningful, Pacheco said. One student said it was a better use of time than going to the mall on a Saturday; another said it made her feel like a leader; and one student even said it was the first time he felt as if he had connected with God.

“We tell them they can only use their phones at night to call their parents,” Pacheco said. “It’s a chance to get them to connect with a side of themselves they never have. They are reading the Bible and practicing messages over their head spiritually the next day. They help strip down selfishness and see, ‘Wow, I’m actually contributing.’”

One of the girls who attends West Orange High School said as she was working she was doing something bigger, and that God inspired her to continue working, Pacheco said.

“Most students aren’t used to working without getting paid for it,” he said. “It’s just really neat that even a seventh-grade boy who goes to a charter in Ocoee, as he was working, had this thought that he really felt inspired and connected with God: Don’t complain, just do the task set before you to help. And he felt a version of him come out, the version that’s there but needs some inspiration, and that’s what God does.”

Contact Zak Kerr at [email protected].