This July, TSA lines filled with students with passports in hand and a desire to learn about missions in their hearts. Volunteers from across the U.S. traveled to eight European countries to take part in the International Mission Board’s youth labs.
Youth labs are a five-day program for high schoolers to learn about missions alongside a long-term IMB missionary, a Journeyman, a local partner and IMB summer interns. Youth labs are part of IMB’s Go Impact program, which offers one and two-week international mission trips for high school youth groups. A total of 109 NextGen volunteers served on Go Impact teams in Europe in July.
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Chris Derry, the IMB’s director of church and campus engagement, joined a Go Impact team.
“The boldness and resilience of the next generation cannot be overstated,” he said. “I watched them knock on thousands of doors, minister to refugees and the homeless, prayer walk the neighborhoods around new church plants, cry after difficult conversations, study new places and cultures and lead people to Jesus.
They were shoulder to shoulder with older college students and seasoned long-term missionaries — watching, learning and growing. If this is a glimpse of what’s coming over the next 10 years in missions, it will soon be our turn to keep up.”
This summer, three students and three adults from First Baptist Church Selma, Alabama, were a part of this next generation when they traveled to Budapest to participate in the city’s youth lab.
“Our hope for the students was that that they would get a glimpse of what it means to be sent, and what the work of the church is, not just locally, but globally, and to have eyes for the Great Commission, not just here in our local context, but around the world,” said Caleb Newsom, the minister of students and sending at FBC.
While FBC has a long missions history and an active Woman’s Missionary Union that deeply values missions involvement, the church hadn’t been overseas on a mission trip since 2008.
When Tim Mathis was hired to be the lead pastor, he knew he couldn’t do it all, and Newsom was hired soon after. Mathis attended the IMB’s Senders Summit, which equipped him with practical ways to mobilize the church. They committed to three mission trips, including the youth lab in Budapest.
Budapest Bound
Lamar Schubert, an IMB missionary in Budapest, and his team hosted youth labs this summer and last summer. This summer, 70 volunteers and nine interns participated in the Budapest labs. The high schoolers received training in the elements of missionary living, including entering a culture, identifying yourself as a spiritual person and engaging people with your testimony and the gospel.
During the morning sessions, students spent time practicing their two-to-three-minute testimonies. Schubert encouraged the students to not think just of their testimonies of “before Christ and after Christ,” but how Jesus is sustaining them now.
In the afternoons, the students visited three different parks to practice what they learned. They asked people they met if they had any prayer needs. This was a segue to sharing their testimonies.
Leighton Grace Bennett, one of the FBC students, listened to a woman share how she grew up Catholic and went to church with her mom, but it felt forced. Bennett also grew up going to church, but once she made a personal decision to follow Jesus, it didn’t feel like an obligation. Praying and going to church filled her with joy. The woman began to cry as Bennett shared how a relationship with Jesus changes everything.
Bennett and her father, who was one of the adults on the team, also had the chance to pray and share the gospel with a drug dealer.
“He wanted Jesus, but he didn’t think that he could [become a Christian] because of how many bad things he’d done,” Bennett said.
Later, the same man approached members of another youth lab team, saying he wanted to hear more about the Holy Spirit. He’s now connected with IMB missionaries.
Bennett said the legacy of a football player inspired her to get involved in missions. Last year, a well-known and loved football player in Selma died after sustaining a head injury during a game.
A few days before his death, he told his youth pastor he wanted to see a revival in his school and in Selma. After his death, Bible studies started across town, including one among the football team.
“I felt led to go on this trip because he always showed Jesus to everybody, and everybody needs to do that, so I loved getting the opportunity to get to go share about Jesus with other people around the world,” Bennett said.
Red light, yellow light, green light, go
Every evening, the team celebrated red, yellow and green lights in their conversations. A “red light” was a rejection or closed door to further conversation. A “yellow light” conversation meant the person hearing the gospel was not ready to decide but was open to follow up. A “green light” was a profession of faith.
“One of the key points that was driven home during the training every morning is that God wants our obedience,” Newsom said. “He wants us to share the gospel no matter what people say. The whole point of celebrating the rejections, was to say, ‘You were obedient, and this conversation may not have been pleasant, but the Lord was glorified in it.’”
Getting the first rejection was like “ripping a Band-Aid off,” he said.
“We know we planted seeds, and we did what the Lord wanted us to do. Even if we did get rejected, we were still doing the Lord’s work,” Bennett said. “The rejections at first seemed very heavy, but the minute you got that one person who wanted to pray or the one person who wanted to hear the gospel, it really changed your perspective.”
Though there were red lights, the FBC team, other youth lab teams and IMB missionaries are celebrating 10 green lights — 10 people chose to make Jesus the Lord of their lives. Youth lab teams from several churches combined had nearly 500 gospel conversations.
Schubert said most of the 10 new Christians have already been in contact with local believers and some have even started their discipleship journey.
From Budapest back to Selma
“All of what we trained is transferable at home, so their commitment time during the week was to write the names of five people they would share the gospel with at home and share that with their youth pastor so he could hold them accountable,” Schubert said.
The students reached out to their five contacts via social media while they were still in Budapest.
Schubert told the team that obedience is stepping out into a place where the outcome of what God will do is uncertain.
Newsom said the students were willing and obedient to go.
“By the end of the trip, they were unanimous and bought into the importance of getting the gospel out,” Newsom said.
They were also willing to be held accountable back home. Bennett was initially scared to approach strangers and share the gospel.
“If He wants you to do it, there’s a purpose for it,” Bennett said. “Whatever I was doing, He already was in front of me preparing the way.”
Bennett said her desire now that she’s back home is to be more comfortable and intentional about sharing the gospel with the people she sees every day. That can be harder than approaching random people on the street, because she’ll most likely never see them again. During the trip, she reached out to the five friends she identified during the training session and invited them to an upcoming youth outreach event at FBC.
Schubert said it was a blessing to watch the team grow in cross-cultural evangelism.
Next year’s summer is full of possibilities for youth to serve on mission with the IMB. To learn more, please visit IMB’s Go Impact website to learn about one and two-week mission trips for high school students.
Some names changed for security reasons.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Tessa Sanchez and originally published by the International Mission Board.
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