Voices

Though Paul Lawler sensed the pull of ministry as early as age eight in the halls of his childhood Methodist church, his teenage and young adult years consisted of skepticism. “I navigated into vague deism and then agnosticism,” Paul says. “I struggled to wrap my head around how a man going to a cross had anything to do with me.”

Encountering the Gospel Darryl came to faith at 13 due to the faithful evangelism of friends who attended local Baptist and Pentecostal churches. He visited a local Baptist church with friends and heard the gospel […]

By his own recollection, Thomas Henry was a shy kid struggling to find where he fit in when he met the Lord. At a Christian camp in 1974, he suddenly felt sure about his relationship with God. The effect on his life was clearly perceptible, both inside and out. “I knew for sure that my savior and my father had found me,” Thomas says. […]

“Looking back, I always had a sense of God’s presence,” says Dave Janvier. As a licensed professional counselor who has worked and researched at the intersection of psychology and spirituality, awareness of God’s presence has been crucial throughout Dave’s life. […]

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. […]