Voices

According to Marty Cramer, she and her husband, Darrell, were raised in very different midwestern American subcultures. Marty was raised in an upper-middle-class family who attended a Methodist church while Darrell grew up in a lower-income family, of which he later became the first college graduate. However, of the many positive outcomes that came from their meeting […]

At 11 years old, Jeannine Brabon had already spent her childhood as a missionary kid in Colombia. Her family traveled to the United States on furlough and attended a missionary conference at which Bill Gilliam, an Asbury Seminary graduate, spoke to the youth. […]

Kelly and Shannon had different upbringings regarding faith but found their lives becoming intertwined with a shared calling to ministry during college. Kelly grew up in a family heavily involved in church and felt a call to ministry as a fourth grader at church camp. […]

Prasanth Bethu’s faith is both a product of the Lord’s grace and a testament to the faithfulness of a resilient woman who was radically saved in a majority-Hindu context: his grandmother. She heard the gospel from someone traveling through the area on business and the simple gospel was enough for the Lord to work. […]

Though he grew up in the church, Mark Martin, in retrospect, doesn’t feel that he truly knew the Lord by the time he was in college. He was studying to become a doctor at the University of New Orleans when an encounter with the Lord changed the course of his life from pre-med to pastor. […]

Asachai began to feel an invitation to a deeper relationship with God, as well as a call to ministry, as a middle school student at a Christian summer camp. By the end of high school, he had become a pastoral intern at a local church. […]

As a businesswoman and theologian with experience in both the marketplace and ministry, Andrea Baare struggled with a sense of guilt for many years. She often wondered if she made the right choice moving into the business world instead of pursuing full-time ministry. […]

Nik Fraustro remembers when Sunday traditions changed in his family growing up. According to him, Sundays were for football, baseball, and other sports. His family didn’t go to church and his father was a corpsman in the United States Navy, meaning they were accustomed to moving. […]

Camp ministry and retreats had already played a significant role in both Eddie and Allyson’s lives before they met. When they did meet it was, serendipitously, at a United Methodist Conference camp […]

For Jess Avery, one of the first calls to leadership in the church came at a Dairy Queen in Dublin, Georgia, when she was 16 years old. At that age, Jess had already developed a desire for spiritual community and started a small group at her high school of like-minded students in their pursuit of the Lord. […]