FIRST PRIORITY BLUE RIDGE INCORPORATED

First Priority's vision is the Hope of Christ in every student. Our goal is to provide multiple opportunities for every teenagers to hear the gospel and to respond, and then to connect those who do respond to a local church to be nurtured and discipled in their Christian walk.

Achieving this main goal requires multiple, smaller goals.

1) Uniting churches across denominations around the common purpose (sharing the gospel with students) and a common strategy (First Priority Campus Clubs).

2) Christians students seeing their schools as mission fields, having a burden to share the Hope they have in Christ, and to actively share the gospel with their peers.

3) Students hearing the gospel and responding, placing their faith in Jesus and being connected to a local church to be discipled.

First Priority Campus Clubs are the main strategy for sharing the Hope of Christ with a generation of students. Once churches catch the vision, they work together to empower their students to establish First Priority Campus Clubs at their schools.

First Priority Clubs utilize what is known as the HOPE Cycle. The HOPE Cycle is a 4 week plan-of-action for the campus clubs, giving them focus and purpose for each time students meet together. HOPE is an acronym for Help, Overcome, Prepare and Engage.

Each week of the HOPE Cycle is designed to equip the students as missionaries to their campus. The 4 weeks look like this:
Help Week: Helping student understand and express the gospel.
Overcome Week: Students overcoming fears and obstacles they face in sharing their faith.
Prepare Week: Preparing personal faith stories.
Engage Week: Engaging the campus with the gospel.

Once students begin sharing their faith with their peers, they work together to disciple new believers and connect them with local churches.

First Priority Blue Ridge is connected to many churches across many denominations in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. As students share their faith on more and more campuses and a growing number of students respond to the gospel, it is causing a "ripple effect" throughout the region.

First Priority Blue Ridge's Executive Director, Haley Wherry, is a full-time employee who dedicates his life to uniting churches and empowering students to share their faith. He has 23+ years of experience in student discipleship, ministry networking and campus ministry.

The First Priority HOPE Cycle is a proven strategy both locally and nationally. With each year, more students are trained, more clubs are established and more students respond to the gospel.

There are many more middle and high school campuses in our region that do not have a First Priority club established on them with students sharing the Hope of Christ.

Thousands of students across our region have not heard the gospel of Jesus Christ nor had a chance to respond.

Thousands of Christian students are "consumers" and not "producers". While they attend church regularly to be fed, we want to see them attending school regularly to feed.

We have not overcome the status quo of division and apathy among most churches.