Young Adult Turned Around by “Impact San Antonio”
August 14, 2015: “I arrived to San Antonio unmotivated and debating if I should continue in the Adventist Church,” said Fernanda Duran, an 18-year-old young woman from the state of Washington in the United States. She was one of the volunteers who participated in community service and outreach projects across the Texas city as the General Conference delegates debated and voted. The experience changed her life.
Duran went home and started Impact Tri-Cities where she lives, using what she learned in San Antonio as a community action worker. She used Facebook and asked her friends to get involved with the goal, “Young adults bringing hope to the Tri Cities community.”
The first project was August 1 at Creation Festival Northwest where Impact Tri-Cities volunteers helped with the booth for Compassion International, a Christian relief and community development organization. The next project is August 22 when the Adventist young adults will join other Christians in a “Convoy of Hope,” distributing free groceries, providing medical and dental screenings, haircuts, family portraits, hot meals and job opportunities to low-income families.
What happened in San Antonio? “What happened was, I was born again,” said Duran. “Jesus reminded me that being Adventist is more than the Sabbath, doctrines, Church Manual, women’s ordination and being vegetarian. Being Adventist is waiting for the second coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” (See Matthew 25.)
“God sparked this huge flame in me, a passion so big that I couldn’t come home and do nothing. I had to impact my community and preach about His love, not just with words, but with actions.”
Pastor Gilbert Cangy, the denomination’s youth ministries director, told Adventist Today that this is just one of many examples of the young adults who participated in Impact San Antonio and caught a vision for service in their own cities. “Something good happened in San Antonio,” observed a veteran youth worker after hearing several of these stories. “There is nothing like hands-on, practical compassion to get you back to the real basics of following Jesus.”
If you would like to encourage Duran and her organization, you can reach them by Email at impacttricities@hotmail.com and she can tell you where to send contributions and/or sign up to help.
Hooray! There is nothing like getting involved in doing things that touch others and improve their lives to give your spiritual life focus and purpose!
William,
Are you trying to tell us there is more blessing to be gained by actually getting out and helping someone, than by sitting at your computer arguing and complaining about others (Conferences, Liberals, Conservatives, Preachers, etc)?
Guess I will just have to sign-off now and go look for someone to help today. Haven’t helped anyone other than family since yesterday evening and I need my daily fix 8-). (Though this morning I have already spent quality time on computer and phone helping some dear folk who are more than a thousand miles away, they were family so I guess that doesn’t score as highly.)
It is an example the effect a young person can have without being in the *power* structure. May the Lord bless her.
I hope that when Fernanda returns home and time has passed that she is being supported by a congregation that respects her personhood and her expressions of sincere love of Christ. I hope her peers support her. I hope her Pastor respects her talents and can accept any differences they may have with her gender and individuality. I really hope she can grow and learn unfettered by sexism and ageism.
There are two questions that every Christian who is working in the secular field
must answer. The first is, “How do I be an effective witness in the sphere of
society to my other non Christian friends?” This is a matter of personally sharing
our faith. It may be done by friendship evangelism, literature distribution, inviting
our colleagues to church, to a Christian Concert, to a crusade, or to one of many
different types of events that presents Christ to them. This is dealing with
personal transformation.
Secondly a question that is often not tackled but must be if we want to see City
Transformation is, “How do I impact society with the values of the Kingdom
through the sphere that I am serving in?”
In other
I read a comment here or on spectrum that on the Sabbath morning of GC session the prez was going on about how wonderful adventism was while at Impact the them was on the needs of the world and how to practically live out the way of Jesus in the face of them.
Thank God for Pastor Cangy and the vision he, so many others and tens of thousands of young people are living out.
I’d be with Impact any day than in the great hall of the general conference. (Except for the cultural music!)