I am currently residing in New Zealand, but originally came from South Africa. Coming from a background where church and state was intertwined, to a country where these two entities are separated made it difficult to settle at first. My other challenge was to get used to communicating about God and Christianity in English. It sounds trivial, but to go from your mother language to a foreign language, especially combined with something as emotional and culturally ingrained as one’s faith, is not easy.
I have grown up as a Christian and in the church. This was fully supported by my whole family. In my later years, my faith has grown as I grew into my own worldview. I have realized that a life without God, is not a life worth living. I work in a high stress environment and need my faith to sustain me on a daily basis. It is through working in a secular country and a secular work environment, that I have come to the conclusion that I need to focus more on living a life walking with God and that I can through this, develop leaders by making use of a Christian foundation. This has been highly successful as a face-to-face endeavor as well as an online movement.
I realized I needed more than just my current Bible knowledge to do this work effectively. I do hold a PhD in Education, but needed what CLI is offering to support my teaching ministry.
Approaching my studies through CLI allows me to carry on with my current position as a High School Principal as well as my other passions of Leadership Development. I see myself at the level of Pastor in my ministry functions. Interacting with people and sharing the word of God with them, as well as how this foundation can support leadership in any workplace, is very satisfying and I would like to build this out further. A Scholarship at CLI will make it possible for me to enhance this ministry and will allow me to serve as a bi-vocational pastor.
As stated before, I work in a secular environment (underpinned by law) and have found that Christians who are in the same situation need more support. This environment makes it difficult to operate within, especially if you do not want to lose your Christian identity. My vision is to enhance my Leadership Development teaching by building in on a foundation of Christianity. I passionately believe that the world will be a better place if more leaders and managers approach their tasks from a Christian perspective. I am fully supported in this endeavor by my wife.
Hello and Blessings in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. My name is Jacqueline Lambert and I live in a small rural community which is located in the United States which is in Mississippi. I am married with 3 children. I was raised in a Christian home not really understanding what that was. We were raised to go to church, but that was about it. I have 1 sister that knows the Lord and attends church and 1 brother that goes to church and 1 that has turned his back on the Lord, but were saved as children.
Religious beliefs are protected here in the USA although a lot of people either don’t believe the true gospel or don’t live what they once believed.
I was brought up to serve the Lord, however I made my decision to really serve the Lord in my teens. I rededicated my life back to the Lord when I was 23 and that decision was life altering. I was a person who came from the slums of the streets from alcohol every day to sober mentality in Christ. My life has not been the same. I was filled with the spirit of the Lord and he began to show me things and teach me his heart and mind that was so different from what I had been taught by traditional church.
Right now my Ministry dream is to continue to tell as many people about the Lord and show them how once you accept the award of God as law for your life it will and can change you. It is to start a ministry in my community that can become a safe haven for the people by teaching the unadulterated word of God.
I am a assistant pastor in my local church but I wanted this course to be better equipped in my knowledge as well as better equipped to lead the people of God and I found out in order to do that you yourself must be equipped in your walk. In which case I have not told anyone that I am doing this course and will keep it that way until the Lord impresses me to reveal it.
I am pursuing this Ministry course because I want to be available and equipped for whatever the Lord wants me to do. I am not doing it to be something. I’m doing it to so that I will be equipped for whatever job the Lord has me in.
A scholarship for me to continue in this course is essential because I currently only have one income in our household, which leaves our income limited so I would not be able to afford to do any type of course if I had to pay for it.
My prayer is that I will be ready and equipped for whatever the Lord wants for me to do and that I will forever walk close to Him and be in His perfect Will.
My name is Brian Verdugo and I serve as a missionary with Youth for Christ International. I was born and raised in Woodland, California which is near Sacramento. My nuclear family consisted of both parents and one sister who is five years younger than I am. My wife and I were married in 1998 and spent several years living in the Los Angeles area before accepting a ministry Assignment in South Africa with Youth for Christ.
My salvation story is one that saw me go from a person repulsed by anything to do with church until my early 20’s to one who was willing to try it out to one who was excited to go to church to one who leaves home to serve God. The change, of course, came through the power of the gospel. I thought that I knew the stories growing up and thought of them just as that, stories. It wasn’t until I opened the Bible under the guidance of strong teachers that I finally saw that there was something there to be studied; there was truth; there was power. My heart must be about two years behind my mind because after two years of being on fire for the study of God’s word, it finally hit me. If everything in the Bible is true, then there is an infinite chasm between me and God.
I realized my desperate sinful condition and need for a savior. I already knew who that Savior was and that He had died for my sins and risen from the dead. Putting those two truths together, I needed only one more thing, the hardest thing. I chose to lay my life down at the feet of Jesus and recognize Him in my heart for what I already knew Him to be in my mind. It was then that I truly became a follower and disciple of Jesus Christ. It has been a wild ride ever since. One that has led me from the United States to South Africa and now to the small island nation of Seychelles where my wife and I are pioneering Youth for Christ. We train leaders and help grow churches, but the heart of what we do is the evangelism and discipleship of unchurched and unreached youth. I cannot think of anything else that I would rather be doing.
I love to learn, but there are many places in the world where there is a shortage of solid Biblical teaching. Seychelles is one of those places. My wife and I were married young and entered the mission field fairly early in life. Though both of us have learned a lot between our church experience and training in YFC, neither of us have any kind of degree or ordination to show for it. The fact that we can change this through CLI is a tremendous blessing and the fact that the cost is amazingly low really helps a couple like us who work on a missionary budget. CLI not only presents the opportunity to learn, but also provides me with some credibility as a servant of the Lord. CLI is also becoming an asset to our ministry here in Seychelles as solid Biblical training is another goal of Youth for Christ Seychelles. We are recommending CLI to many leaders in Seychelles. Our own pastor has recently applied and is anxious to start the CLI courses.
Though I don’t work in any one church, I identify myself most with the term Pastor. As I stated, my ministry is heavily focused on evangelism and discipleship and I am deeply involved in this ministry day to day. I have had the privilege of seeing many young people come to the Lord, but I don’t feel that I am a gifted evangelist, I am just doing what every Christian is expected to do. I feel that my strongest gifts come in the form of teaching and shepherding, therefore I feel that I am gifted in the mold of a pastor. You could say that I am a pastor of unchurched youth.
Seychelles faces many spiritual challenges. The foremost problem that I see is a lack of trained pastors and Biblical teachers. Many churches stray out of bounds doctrinally and people are very confused as to what the Bible teaches about salvation, spiritual gifts and the work of the Holy Spirit. Fortunately, we have the support of many churches in the United States and our local church here in Seychelles is becoming a shining city on a hill when it comes to solid Biblical teaching. We have many people from this church serving as volunteers and board members in Youth for Christ Seychelles. Youth for Christ Seychelles has been given access to secondary school campuses through our Campus Life program. The simplest way I can describe Campus Life is that it is a crazy youth group type atmosphere with loud music and the Bible being presented in a way that unchurched youth can appreciated and understand it.