Equipping Youth to Share the Gospel

Every successful military force in the world must not only recruit eligible, able-bodied soldiers, but must also teach, train, and equip each soldier in preparation to fight whatever battle they may encounter.

The training is not easy. It is philosophically and physically intense and thorough, because each soldier must be ready to deploy on a mission at a moment’s notice. 

Ellen White also writes about soldiers—young soldiers—who, if properly trained, would make an incredible global impact in sharing the good news of Jesus. She writes, “With such an army of workers as our youth, rightly trained, might furnish, how soon the message of a crucified, risen, and soon-coming Saviour might be carried to the whole world!” (Education, p. 127). During my 20 years of ministry in Adventist education, I have learned so much about young people. They have taught me that they are driven, energetic, passionate, and resilient. So, if we want to recruit a group of individuals as a church who will share the gospel with the world—with drive, energy, resilience, and passion—why wouldn’t we invest in training and equipping our youth? 

That is exactly what we are committed to do at Great Lakes Adventist Academy. This August, our school chaplain, Pastor Jeff Akenberger, and I led our faculty and staff through an interactive and collaborative exercise to cast the spiritual and missional vision for the school year. Included in this vision were four key components: 

1. Demonstrating effective educational leadership through mentorship and, more importantly, modeling our personal walk with the Lord as Adventist educators;
2. Ministering with spiritual intentionality in our daily lives, including how to most effectively “Sabbath” together as a school family, honor God through our ministry, and purposefully and intentionally lead our students to make decisions to follow Jesus; 
3. Following Christ’s method of reaching our students’ hearts through service, love, and care, which are especially important on a boarding school campus when students are away from home; and 
4. Equipping and training our faculty, staff, and students in soul-winning best practices to make a significant impact in Michigan and beyond for the Lord. 

This vision perfectly aligned with the spiritual direction that the Lord had already placed on our hearts months before the school year began. The Holy Spirit was leading us and challenging us to intentionally: 

1. Disciple our students in the fundamental beliefs and doctrines that we have embraced and love as Seventh-day Adventists;   
2. Equip them to share the good news of Jesus with others through outreach and evangelism; and 
3. Train them by providing the necessary tools and opportunities to build their confidence in leading others through a series of Bible studies. 

So, we partnered with Pastors Mark Howard and Kameron DeVasher of Emmanuel Institute to provide a week-long intensive evangelism training for our entire school family and local church community. We purposely planned for this training to take place during the first week of the second semester in January, praying that the training would set the spiritual tone for the remainder of the school year. And we praise God the result was worth all of the prayerful hours of planning and organization as the Holy Spirit was poured out at Great Lakes Adventist Academy in a mighty way! Junior Elena Potter will share her personal experience in the following pages.

The wonderful thing is that this entire event is reproducible, not only here at Great Lakes Adventist Academy, but at other academies division-wide. Furthermore, the ongoing blessing to our Michigan Conference territory is that our GLAA students have been trained and equipped to impact their local churches and communities, collaborating on outreach initiatives with local congregations. In essence, with the Lord's help and guidance, we have effectively mobilized an "army of youth" to fulfill the Commission that has been set before us all, to share the wonderful news of a loving Savior with a dying world!