WHITAKERS — Frank Hamrick wants teens to have a passion for God.
When he was a youth pastor 25 years ago for Falls Road Baptist Church in Rocky Mount, it was Hamrick’s job to stoke that fire in the teenagers in his ministry. It was a job he loved.
Now, years after he stopped being a youth pastor, Hamrick still tries to help children and teens not just at his own church but worldwide as the president and founder of Positive Action for Christ Inc. The mission of the nonprofit publishing house in Whitakers is to supply thousands of teachers and youth leaders with the resources they need to help children and teens develop a strong relationship with God.
“We don’t see Christianity so much as a lifestyle or a creed but as a living relationship with a great, glorious, loving God. What we are trying to do is to help teachers help kids build that relationship with him,” Hamrick said.
Positive Action is one of the three largest providers of Christian school curriculum in the world, said Gerry Carlson, its marketing director. In addition to the schools, the company provides materials for church youth education, home school curriculums and discipleship.
“During the school year, we have a couple hundred thousand, maybe 250,000, students studying our materials on a daily basis,” Carlson said.
Many of the company’s 17 employees have a background working with youth, Hamrick said. He kept his job as youth pastor and then pastor at Falls Road until 1994, when a heart attack and several doctors’ warnings led him to leave the ministry.
It is important to equip leaders to be effective about reaching teens, said Editor C.J. Harris, who was a youth pastor for six years before he went to work for Positive Action.
“A lot of the times you get into a youth ministry situation where the youth pastor is just all about making sure the kids behave themselves and don’t get arrested or don’t get into things that are going to cause them trouble in life. You can get so focused on all the problems that teens are facing that you really don’t minister to them who God is, who Jesus Christ is,” Harris said.
Fostering that relationship with God has been the main focus from the publishing house’s beginnings in 1969, when Hamrick wrote a curriculum for the ProTeens club he started at Falls Road. Friends and fellow youth pastors heard about ProTeens, asked to use the materials and then told more people about it.
By 1971, 35 churches were using Hamrick’s materials, and the ProTeens ministry was growing. A board was formed and the organization was incorporated as Positive Action for Christ Inc. in July 1972.
Though it began at Falls Road and initially was favored by Baptist youth pastors, the education materials’ focus on the basics of the Bible made it nondenominational, Hamrick said. The company’s Christian school curriculums, which it first offered in 1983, also are nondenominational.
For more than 30 years, the company kept growing, Hamrick said. It outgrew a house owned by the church, a former cleaning plant and a building rented from Rocky Mount Mills. Since 2005, Positive Action has worked from a renovated former school in Whitakers that fits the company’s needs perfectly, Hamrick said.
Each step in the organization’s growth seems to be ordered by God, Hamrick said. Each time the company reached the limits of its machinery or location, doors would open to give it room for growth. Positive Action has gone from being printed loose-leaf in black and white on a mimeograph machine to full-color bound books that have to be contracted out to printing companies because of demand.
Hamrick summed up the company’s success with the words of a former employees, Ward Terrill, who said, “Whatever God has ordered, he pays for.”
In the last two years, the company has seen some negative effects from the economy, Hamrick said. Sales flattened out in 2008 and have taken a dip this year. Christian schools are struggling as many parents decide to homeschool their children to save money.
“The market is changing, so we are having to adjust as well. We are becoming more aggressive in the home school market and sales to try to make up for some of the leveling off and the flattening of the Christian school market,” Hamrick said.
The goal is not to make money for profit, though, Carlson said. Profits are plowed back into the company to be used for programs and ministries it supports and growth to reach more people.
The company has a free program called Youth Leaders Cafe, which meets one day every three months to offer workshops on being more effective while ministering to teens. It also provides free Christian curriculum materials to the Ukraine, which are used in public schools throughout the country.
