Jess Avery

The Dairy Queen Conversation to College Ministry

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. Her youth pastor noticed her passion and was one of the first people to recognize the call of ministry on Jess’ life. “She sat me down and actually began to talk to me about going to Asbury [Seminary] someday,” Jess says. “And I did not really have a good understanding of what that meant or what a calling was or how to even begin to move that direction.”

Soon after that seed of a conversation, however, opportunities began to arise for Jess to grow in ministry leadership. Her local church offered her an internship during high school so she could experience working on a church staff. Then, after high school, Jess quickly became involved in the Wesley Foundation at the University of Georgia. During her time with the Wesley Foundation, the ministry experienced a significant move of God among students. “Every week, the preacher would preach and then there was an open altar call and invitation,” Jess says. “He would preach from the scripture and then he would invite. ‘If you need this from Jesus or something else, do not leave until you’ve come and you’ve done business with him.’ And so during my college years, it was so normal. The altar would stay open for an hour or two after the sermon every single week.”

Along with having a weekly service for students, the leadership team, to which Jess belonged, would gather an hour before the service to pray and earnestly ask for the Lord to move among the students. “And that was very normative,” Jess says. “This was just part of being in any level of leadership, that you showed up and you prayed for an hour.”

Being in that environment and experiencing the way God was moving among her peers marked Jess with a desire to see what she describes as “an awakening move of God among young people.” However, understanding what that calling entails and gaining the experience and practice to steward it is something she would work on over the next few years of ministry. “It took several years through my adult life working in various churches and parachurch ministries to begin to unfold and understand a calling to really help equip the next generation as they pursue a move of God,” Jess says.

After Jess graduated, the Wesley Foundation offered her a one-year internship, an experience that was incredibly impactful for her. “I can honestly say that year was so transformational for me. It confirmed a calling in me and made me really recognize God actually made me to do this stuff,” she says. 

Jess grew in confidence in her calling as she practiced things like one-on-one discipleship with students. However, she also began to recognize a struggle with confidence in leadership as a woman in ministry, an issue she would continue to wrestle with throughout her ministry experience. In her college ministry, as well as many other ministries, most of the senior leadership was male. She says it took her a long time to discover other women who held senior leadership roles in the church. “I think part of it was just my own lack of confidence,” Jess says. “And a lot of times when people are looking for a leader, they’re not necessarily looking for a woman, particularly a young woman and a young single woman.”

Seminary and Church Planting in Scotland

After her internship at the Wesley Foundation, Jess fulfilled what her youth pastor had encouraged her to do and moved to Asbury Seminary to earn a Master of Arts in Christian Education. After completing her degree, she worked for a few years in churches and parachurch organizations. Eventually, she stumbled across an opportunity to help plant a church in Edinburgh, Scotland. “Friendship was kind of how that unfolded,” Jess says. “I’ve actually found that some of the sweetest stuff I’ve ever stepped into has been through just relational connections.”

Serving a church in a different country was a challenge. Though there may be many similarities between the U.K. and the United States compared to other countries, Jess found that the longer she lived there, the more challenging differences she discovered. “Scotland is a post-Christian place. It’s about 1%-2% Christian,” Jess says. “And so it’s really difficult in that way. The churches, people sort of view them with some suspicion.”

Despite the challenges, the church was fruitful in its ministry. The church primarily worked with college students, and most of the growth came from new believers rather than people coming from other churches. These students also came from a variety of cultures and nationalities given that Edinburgh is a very international city. According to Jess, at one point the church had about 50 attendees and about eight to ten different countries represented among the congregants. “The world was at our doorstep,” Jess says. “There’s lots of challenges with trying to work between that many cultures. But it was phenomenal to see students come to faith, and often we’d see their families back in their home country come to faith as well.”

Jess’ experience at the church in Scotland also caused her to further recognize the significance of what happens in the years of young adulthood. “Emerging adults make decisions that really they live out of the rest of their lives,” Jess says. “They’re often choosing a vocation, they’re choosing a city, they’re choosing a partner, they’re choosing some kind of permanent decisions or things that really impact the long haul in those years. And there’s an openness to sort of figure out the value system and to figure out who they are. There’s a lot of spiritual questions that come up for emerging adults.”

This realization solidified Jess’s desire to work with emerging adults. After her time in Scotland, she returned to Kentucky and started a job at Asbury Seminary in the admissions office. Once again, she found herself interacting with college students and young adults as part of her job. Almost daily she was having conversations with young adults about the big questions of life.

The D.Min. Program, Arise Church, and Awakening Project

Not long after she returned to Kentucky, a mentor figure encouraged her to pursue the Doctor of Ministry degree through Asbury Seminary. Though she had not previously considered it, Jess felt that it would help her find clarity for her next steps and further discern the invitation from God for her life. Not only that, but it allowed her to hone in on a specific subject within the ministry to young adults and gain expertise in the area she felt called. “I was trying to think how we equip the next generation, so I basically studied mentorship for emerging adults,” Jess says. 

More specifically, she studied what was happening developmentally in young adults and what cultural changes were making young adulthood last longer in contemporary times than in times past. “The findings that I really concluded were about mentorship perceived as a network rather than a one-on-one relationship,” Jess says. “So, helping emerging adults sort of build their own personal board of directors.”

This network approach to mentorship and discipleship related directly to Jess’ ministry after earning her D.Min. Jess and some close friends, including fellow Asbury Seminary alumni Austin and Maddie Wofford, began to dream about planting a church in Lexington, Kentucky. However, they had also done ministry at other college campuses and had established a regional connection of people pursuing spiritual awakening in young adults. Ultimately, they decided to pursue both through a church plant called Arise Church and a ministry called Awakening Project. This allowed for the regional work of Awakening Project to be rooted in a local church and allowed Arise Church to be something like a lab for learning things to share with the greater network. 

For Arise Church, the founding team decided to adopt a house church model. In doing so, Jess and the team sought to emphasize a more intimate and relational space that would enable young adults to form intergenerational relationships to support their spiritual growth. They also hoped to provide a style of church that allows people to grow in leadership. “We have found that it’s been deeply relationally connected, which has been healing to many people who are isolated,” Jess says. “And we find that leaders are emerging who otherwise would have just been sort of audience members. That has been really beautiful and fruitful.”

Awakening Project and the Outpouring

In 2021, Awakening Project held its first conference-like event to encourage and equip young people. About 60 people attended from churches and ministries with which Jess and the team had relationships and connections. “We just called friends around and said, ‘Would you like to come to this thing? We don’t exactly know what we’re going to do yet, but we want to see a move of God among the young,’” Jess says.

Since that first event, the Awakening Project’s yearly gatherings have more than doubled in attendance. In 2024, the ministry expanded to London with an inaugural gathering there through partnerships with local churches. “It ends up being a place where they receive a lot of content to unpack the rest of the year,” Jess says. “So with the young adults, we talk a lot about vocation. We talk about how to follow Jesus in the midst of a transition. How do you really walk in victory all the way through your twenties? How do you seek a move of God on your college campus or in your first job?”

In addition to the yearly gatherings, Awakening Project plans on launching cohorts to continue to foster relationships between churches and ministries while continually pouring into young adults. Jess says that the ministry has really turned into a network of deep friendships with leaders, pastors, and emerging leaders seeking to encounter God and further his Kingdom in our day.

A major event that catalyzed Awakening Project’s mission was the 2023 Outpouring at Asbury University. Jess, the Woffords, and many of their friends and co-laborers were involved in helping minister throughout that move of God, and it gave Jess a passion to see that move continue. “Part of our role now is actually helping to steward some of the outworkings of that outpouring,” Jess says. “People have curiosity around the leadership or have curiosity around the presence and power of God or creating communities where people can encounter him like they did in Hughes Auditorium. A lot of our work has now begun to move in that direction.”

The Outpouring was in many ways a taste of the end goal for the relational ministry network that has formed with the Awakening Project. However, she says that she longs for the day when there is a story that eclipses that of the Outpouring. “What I long for isn’t another 16 days of the presence of God in Hughes Auditorium,” Jess says. “It’s for thousands of churches all over the world to host the presence of Jesus in such a consistent and reliable way that people anywhere can know they could go and meet with him.”