Leveraging Your 20s For The Nations

At 20-years-old, I was convinced that I was going to be a missionary. Seven years later, it seems God had different plans. Today, I lead global missions in my local church in Birmingham, Alabama, but I’ve never moved overseas.

And yet, God has given me so much joy in leveraging my 20s for the nations, and in meeting others who are doing the same. Here is what I’ve learned from a few of them:

WELCOME THE NATIONS AROUND YOU

I met Josh when we were 18. We were both college freshmen, and I learned he spent the first few years of life as a missionary kid in Brazil before moving to Birmingham.

A year after we graduated college, I heard he couldn’t come hang out with our friends because he was driving an Afghan refugee family to soccer class. I was intrigued.

I started to ask questions, and learned Josh grew up playing soccer and that he was leveraging the sport to build friendships with people from all over the world who came to our city. He spent time on our college campus with international students and exemplified what it looked like to welcome the nations around him.

A few years later, Josh began serving as one of the leaders of our international ministry. Today, God is using him to help over 50 members in our church reach those who are coming to our city from hard-to-reach countries around the world.

SEND OTHERS TO THE NATIONS

After Bradie graduated college, she spent two years in the Philippines. She probably thought she was going to spend the rest of her life serving as a missionary in a far away place. But today, she lives here in Birmingham, and helps mobilize hundreds of college students to serve with Campus Outreach around the world.

God may have brought her off the mission field, but he’s using her to mobilize many young adults to play a role in the Great Commission. She serves on our church’s mobilization team and spent the summer training alongside our missionary candidates.

I love how Josh and Bradie live such ordinary lives in an extraordinary way. They live and work far from the hardest places on earth, but God is using their ordinary lives to make Jesus known everywhere.

They probably aren’t going to serve as long-term missionaries, but their impact will extend to the nations. Everyday faithfulness aimed toward God’s glory being made known among every nation.

GO TO THE NATIONS

Colton reached out to me when I first started working at Radical over six years ago. After listening to sermons from David Platt and John Piper, God gave him a deep desire to serve as a missionary in Japan. He went to his local church and shared his desire to be part of reaching the unreached, and he began working at his church while studying in seminary.

He observed his pastors, got opportunities to preach, and learned how to counsel people in hard situations. After seminary, his church connected him with a trusted agency and he began to receive specialized training for his future in Japan. A few years later, he moved to Japan and began studying Japanese. Today, he serves outside of Tokyo with a local church and ministers among the second-largest unreached people group in the world.

I’m so grateful for Colton and his willingness to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth, and I pray for him regularly. But, for every Colton who will go to the nations and establish and strengthen churches in hard places, we need a hundred people like Josh and Bradie, who will stay and leverage their lives for the nations right where they are.

Starting in your 20s is a great time to begin.