Mission FireFly: the Creative Niche for Christian Teens™
Christian teens with the creative bent from all over the world are welcome to submit original poetry, stories, devotionals, art & photography to share with other teens. Original video & audio/music clips can also be submitted as well as youth group game & activity ideas.
Some History for the Historically Inclined
Mission FireFly first began in the spring of 2005 as the web outreach ministry of the Sozo Youth group of Upper Cross Roads Baptist Church in Baldwin, Maryland. At that time, the site resided on a subdomain of the youth group's website (no longer in existence) and was called the FireFly blog. Visitors would come from all over the world and post stories, poetry, devotionals, etc.
As the blog grew (and as traffic increased), the website administrator, Andrew Jensen (then the UCRBC youth pastor), decided to move the site to its own domain name and set it up under the phpNuke content management system platform. In doing so, he purchased the domain name MissionFireFly.com to be associated with the new youth ministry website. The move took place in the fall of 2005.
During Mission FireFly's days as a phpNuke site, the site saw periods of intense as well as idle activity. People could begin their own journals, submit creative works, publish posts in forums, comment & rate other people's entries, and vote in polls.
In the summer of 2006, a creative story writing contest was begun, but shortly before it came to a close, a hacker from Turkey struck the website twice--first, the forum was partially crippled and then, finally, the entire website database was destroyed.
While the attacks were taking place, the Mission FireFly staff were working on developing a more complex website on another domain name. Plans were put on hold when the webmaster was no longer able to focus his attention on developing the new site.
A couple months later, a phpBB forum was installed in place of the former, hacked site; however, by that time, many of Mission FireFly's original users had left and spammers abused the forum.
MissionFireFly.com then sat dormant for some time. A transitional static html site was put up which was live through the end of 2008 when it was replaced by the current design in April 2009. The Sozo Firm team (MF is a ministry website owned & run by Sozo Firm) is committed to "rejuvenating" the Mission FireFly website and bringing back the life into it. The writing contests will be returning soon as a result. We'd like to encourage you to pass word on to your friends about MissionFireFly.com and to be some of the "first" to submit articles.
Over the days & weeks to come, we'll be going through the MF archives and reposting some of the content from the first two versions of MissionFireFly.com.
If you're a creative writer, artist or photographer, this is the place to feature your creative works!
Thanks for visiting,
Andrew Jensen
MissionFireFly.com's webmaster