Statement Of Purpose: My Story

I accepted Jesus as my Lord and savior when I was only five years old at an Awana meeting.  I didn't know much about theology or church doctrine but I knew that I was a sinner and that I needed Jesus to rescue me from that sin.  As I entered my teenage years the LORD used the youth ministry that I was a part of to help me develop a more robust understanding of the Gospel of Christ.  Specifically, in high school at a youth revival the speaker helped me understand what it meant to surrender to God.  He talked about how an individual’s relationship with Jesus should affect every aspect of his or her life at all times.  I vowed to let God have control of all aspects of my life during that revival.

Looking back at the huge impact children’s and youth ministries have had on my own faith journey, it is quite fitting that God called me to minister to young people.  I first felt that God might be calling me to the ministry field when I was a sophomore in high school. In order to determine whether or not this call was genuine I tried to serve as much as possible during the rest of my high school years. At the end of my senior year while doing an exit speech on public speaking, I showed a clip of myself speaking to another church’s youth group.  The reaction to those watching it convinced me that God was calling me to Youth Ministry.  These teachers and community leaders had little to say about my actual presentation and instead kept focusing on the message I had delivered in the video.

 I enrolled at Olivet Nazarene University intending to double major in youth ministry and sports medicine.  I quickly learned that this double-major idea was not a realistic one.  I was at a crossroads, would I follow my love of sports or embrace my call.  In the end, I chose to stay true to what I had been learning in my youth group and surrendered my will to His. 

Since then I have spent over a decade ministering to young people as a volunteer and as a part-time or full-time staff person in social work, para-church and church settings.  My experiences have brought many lessons, one of them being, that the “usual” children’s and youth ministry paradigms are not working.  Those of us in ministry have to, above all else, be in the business of making disciples.  Those who work with young people must seek to create life-long followers of Christ.  Statistics show that we are failing to do just that nearly half the time.  That means one out of every two seniors that comes across my path will either temporarily or permanently walk away from Christ. 

Those are odds that I cannot deal with.  It is my prayer that God will use the Youth and Family Ministry program to equip me with new ways to successfully make disciples for Jesus.  My dream is that five and ten years from now I will be blessed with story after story of emerging adults who participated in our youth programs and who are still passionately chasing after Christ. 

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