Several years ago some of our Create Emerge team met Naomi at her church, and she got inspired by a life-filled picture of missions. She did a Discipleship Training School, came on staff at YWAM Wollongong (where we also serve), and started feeling a bit of an ‘oomph’ to get Australian youth more involved in missions activity. Praise Jesus! Mobilizing youth into missions is our reason for being after all.
After years of prayer and preparation, Naomi has now spearheaded a local branch of Mission Adventures here at YWAM Wollongong. Mission Adventures facilitates short term overseas trips for high school students in the hopes of giving them a taste for more long-term involvement down the road.
Exciting stuff! And even more exciting, Naomi and crew have just returned from their very first MA outreach. Because it was the inaugural trip, it felt significant, and worth documenting. Two members of the Create Emerge crew, Richard and Andrew, hopped along to Cambodia with their cameras in tow.
Our guys grabbed great interviews highlighting the value of short-term and long-term missionaries working together. They were also able to document the team as they stepped out in a whole bunch of new ways: they taught English, led children’s programs and ministered in villages and a drug rehabilitation centre. In what has to be a trip highlight, they led seven addicts to follow Jesus and saw a handful of them get healed of various illnesses!
When it came time to depart, most students said they weren’t ready to leave. Hopefully this trip gave them all a taste of what a life with Jesus can look like!
“The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what’s ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less.”
-2 Corinthians 5:5 (MSG)
