The Challenge
Twenty years of student ministry produces more story than a short film can hold: founders, alumni now leading their own families, thousands of students discipled across three Birmingham campuses. Bigtime needed a film that could honor that full history without turning into a nostalgia reel, one built to celebrate the past while making the case that the ministry's next twenty years matter just as much as its first.
The Approach
Ninety Nine Natives produces ministry anniversary and youth discipleship films built around testimony, not a timeline of events. This film traces Bigtime's arc across generations: founder Zach Skipper on the original vision, current student interns living out discipleship week to week, and a former student, now 26, showing what that investment looks like twenty years downstream. Interviews across five roles, founder, staff, alumnus, parent, and current students, let the ministry's impact speak in its own voices rather than a single narrator's summary.
The Execution
The film opens on why Bigtime started, a gap its founder saw in students' lives and a conviction that discipleship works best alongside the local church, not apart from it. It moves into what that looks like today: small groups, mission trips, and student leaders mentoring younger students in relationships built on more than a weekly meeting. It closes by tracing that investment forward, a former student now describing how Bigtime shaped who he became, and current student leaders already discipling the next generation, tying twenty years of faithfulness to a vision for what comes next.
The Result
The film gives Bigtime Ministries an anniversary piece built to do two things a highlight reel can't: prove twenty years of youth discipleship through the people who lived it, and cast vision for continued support heading into the ministry's next chapter. Told through founder, staff, alumni, and student voices instead of a single narrator, it turns two decades of Bible studies, retreats, and mission trips into evidence of lives actually changed.
