I have seen hundreds of students lives transformed by Christ through
short-term missions trips. It has become one of my main pillars of discipleship within my own life and in my student ministry.
I can not separate missions from our student ministry. If I do, it eliminates one of my biggest discipleship tools I have ever had. I have seen missions transform my student ministry year after year as it has helped me and my students live out our faith in a fresh and real way.
One of the greatest discipleship tools we have used on a missions trip has been “
Listening Prayer“. Simply put, we come together as a team to pray and listen to God as he speaks to us in a way that we have not experienced before, primarily because we usually don’t take the time to do this.
Our students are blown away by this. They realize that God really does speak and wants to be involved in every aspect of their lives. Then to act on what God has said is a leap of faith and life changing.
For example, this past summer we were in Kenya, Africa for two weeks. We set aside our planned ministry agenda and came together each and every morning to pray with the expectation that God would speak to us and then lead us to who and where He specifically wanted us to minister.
I remember God speaking very clearly to three of our students about where God wanted to lead us and specifically what that would look like. He wanted us to go down into the valley and share the gospel. I tried to discourage this, because we have never been down in the valley and this was not the focus for our trip, our focus was in the village near the orphanage we were staying.
As we began to pray more, God made it very clear to our team that we were to go down into the valley to minister and also show the “Jesus” film. As we went down into the valley, the Lord lead us to people who were hungry for the gospel. As we shared the gospel with many individuals and showed the Jesus film, many of my students felt like God was speaking to them about sharing their testimony or sharing the gospel publicly.
That night, hundreds of people came to know Christ. Some of the testimonies of the Kenyans were mind-blowing. One that came to know Christ shared, “No one in all of history has ever come down into this valley to share about Jesus, we are a forgotten people down here.”
Another said, “I have been a Christian for many years, and I have been praying that God would send someone to share the hope of Jesus with the people of the valley. Now that you have come to the valley, it has given us Christians the courage to continue spreading the gospel through out the valley.”
How is missions discipleship? Through the example of listening prayer in a missions trip this past summer my students were able to maybe for the first time really hear God’s voice when they listened. They were able to act on what they heard God say to them, they were able to see the fruit that was produced through their obedience.
The students that experienced this are now living this out in their daily lives at school and within our student ministry, they have been transformed and have become more like Christ.
Randy Stensgard, Student Ministry Pastor at Centennial Covenant Church in Littleton, Colorado
