A quiet moment at the Inside Out program.

Check back here for details on our next trip to watch the Cavs play.

The youth program at First Baptist is designed for teens to feel like the church is a safe place where they have fun and learn about faith.

Whether they’re playing Wii at church, horseback riding at Camp Koinonia, cheering on the Cavs or splashing each other at Kalahari Water Park, the teens in the First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland know how to make fellowship fun.

Jae Williams, Director of Youth Ministries, makes sure the youth program doesn’t feel like another day at school. In fact, it feels more like a summer vacation.

Even the service projects, like selling Christmas trees in December to raise money (more on that soon), feel like fun – cold and all.

Learn how to produce an Internet radio show, shoot and edit film, and create art with clay, chalk and paint at the First Baptist Church Open Door Summer Camp, at First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland, 3630 Fairmount Blvd., Shaker Heights.

 

Registration is underway for the camp that runs June 28 - Aug. 27, Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The cost is $25 for the entire camp and it includes visits to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Kalahari Water Park and Cedar Point.

 

To pick up your application, stop by the church office during business hours. 

 

For more details, call Jae Williams, Youth Director, First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland 216-932-7480.

During our creative writing class at summer camp, we wrote a love letter to French Fries together.

Here's how it goes: 

Dear French Fries,
So hot and salty. 
You are fat and greasy.
You are a nasty, curly, stinky crunchy.
When I think of you I think of soft and yellow.
I love to eat you because you are all different shapes and sizes.
In the package, glowing with grease, there is nothing more I would love to eat.

 

In the beginning, the youth of First Baptist Church of Greater Cleveland just had one room. And they loved it.

The Montage Teen Lounge and Learning Center was a great place to relax, play video games, go on the computer, play pool or watch TV. And it got a lot of use.

But on April 18, the youth will have an entire second floor wing -- the former Shelburn Wing -- to call their own. And now it will be called it the Amelia Bretz Education Wing. This new youth educational center will be bigger and better.

Thank you Ted Bretz and Chancel Choir!

The space was previously used by the Chancel Choir as their dressing and rehearsal rooms. They now have brand new space in the Phillips Chapel, says Jae Williams, youth director. Williams said he is especially grateful to the Chancel Choir for agreeing to move to the new space so all the youth rooms will be in the same wing.

Thanks to a $10,000 donation from the Rev. Ted Bretz, all the rooms in the wing will be renovated, painted and carpeted.

Book Donations Welcome

The Montage Teen Lounge and Learning Center will be a library filled with books for youth (in other words, a quiet room). This news will delight those who have meetings in the Adams Parlor directly under it on the first floor. We are accepting donations of your favorite books for the library so other teens can borrow them to read.

The library will be decorated with photos of great women and will be available for youth to use as an art studio. The mini kitchen off the Montage Room will get a new refrigerator and dishwasher. (No more paper products, they’re going green!)

Brand new computers and an internet radio station

Down the hallway, a room formerly used as the choir dressing room will become a computer center. Ten computers will be installed, the plaster on the walls is being patched, new carpet is being installed and the room will be painted.  A TV editing and production/Internet radio studio room will be located in the computer lab as well.

Jae Williams’ office will move into this wing.

The former choir rehearsal room will be the new game room. Both the pool tables will be moved in to this room, as well as a ping pong table, air hockey, shuffleboard, a flat screen television, a treadmill and a sit up bench.

Alarms and cameras for safety and security

The whole wing will be alarmed and will have security cameras in each room. Air conditioning units will be installed in the rooms as well.

“Young people can come here and have a get together,” Williams says. “And they can have dances in the Spahr Center.”

Williams says he’d like the students to collaborate on a mural for the wing.

“It’s going to be awesome!” says Williams.

For details on using the new wing or the Spahr Center for gatherings, see Jae Williams.

A DJ diamond in the rough

As a teen, Jae wanted to be a singer, loved to dance, and started DJ-ing dances in the ninth grade.

Jae got his first shot on the radio while helping his grandfather clean radio stations.

He loved watching the radio DJs at work. He listened to them talk into the microphone and watched them set up the records to play on the air.

But one night, the man on the air was drunk and the record he was playing got stuck – playing the same phrase over and over.

DJ, put a record on

The station’s general manager was in Akron and called the hotline, which Jae’s grandfather answered. He told Jae’s grandfather to pull the drunken DJ away from the microphone and put a record on and let the whole thing play.

That would give the general manager just enough time – about 30 minutes – to drive from Akron to Cleveland and remedy the situation.

The problem was, Jae’s grandfather didn’t know how to operate the record turntable. Lucky for him, Jae did.

Romey's Alive and Kicking

“I had been watching this guy every time we came there so I knew how to do it,” Jae said, gesturing how to slide the record backwards to get just at the start of the song.

Jae, who was 14 years old at the time, selected a Stevie Wonder album and set it up to start playing the song, “Signed, Sealed Delivered I’m Yours.”

“I cleared my throat, put the head phones on – they were big old gigantic things not like they use now – and I came up with this saying, ‘Here I am, alive and kicking and my name is Romey.’”

That was Jae’s nickname at the time – it was short for Jerome.

Keep talking

Right away, the hotline started flashing again.

“My grandfather answered the phone and I see him walking toward me. I know he’s gonna kill me because the manager didn’t want anybody talking,” Jae said.

His grandfather said, “I don’t know what you did, but you better keep talking because he likes what you’re doing.”

When the general manager got there, he asked if he could  bring Jae (Romey at the time) on board as an R&B radio announcer.

“My grandfather said that is not going to happen. And my grandfather was for real too. He made it perfectly clear that was not going to happen,” Jae remembered. “I must have cried for days. The general manager kept calling, can you bring him back. My grandfather said that’s not his calling.”

Mad wears off

So after a few days, his grandfather came in the room. He was a big man – stood 6-feet tall and weighed 275 pounds. When he spoke, people sat up and listened.

“He says, 'I need to tell you something, boy,'” Jae recalled, lowering his voice to a deep baratone.

“What’s that sir?” Jae asked.

“Mad wears off,” his grandfather said.

"I thought he was trippin.’ This was my time to shine in America. This ain’t wearing off," Jae said, remembering that day. "But he was right.”

The start of something big

So eventually the station manager called back and asked if Jae could do DJ a gospel radio show on Sunday mornings.

His grandfather said yes.

And that was the start of a prestigious 29-year career in radio.

Today, Jae is the executive producer and host of the number one urban inspirational talk show on WHKW 1220 AM titled "What's Up with the Church?" On Tuesday nights, he invites the youth in to talk about “What’s Up with the Youth?”