#GrowingTogether

By Justin Yang

Texas Conference Young Adult Ministries launched in December 2019, just months before the COVID-19 lockdown began. God has been gracious, and we took great strides, gained momentum, and made crucial connections for and with the next generation.

Young Adult Ministries connects generations for and to Christ. The first connection we were able to make was with high school seniors who graduated from Youth Ministries and entered Young Adult Ministries. Some transitioned to Southwestern Adventist University in Keene, Texas, or to another Seventh-day Adventist university. Still, about 80 percent of our high school seniors attend a public or non-

JUSTIN YANG Director ABIGAIL ESPINOSA Administrative Assistant

Seventh-day Adventist college or university.

For this reason, we launched chapters of Adventist Christian Fellowship (ACF) on public campuses, and to date, we have an Adventist presence on 16 campuses in Texas. These chapters are our largest mission fields, with 30,000 to 40,000 students on each campus.

Host churches (or Seventh-day Adventist faculty and staff) extend their support and encouragement by welcoming students, providing community and empowering them with discipleship and leadership development. If you’d like to adopt a campus or help launch a chapter on a campus near you, please email ACF@txsda.org.

For freshmen who enroll at Southwestern Adventist University (SWAU), we provide an annual luncheon to officially welcome them into Young Adult Ministries. We also partner with Pathways to Success, the Spiritual Life and Development team and the Student Association to journey with these students while they are on campus. To date, we have served over 300 freshmen.

For seniors who are ready for graduation, we provide a senior luncheon to remind them that their diploma from SWAU is not a goodbye; we’re willing to go forward with them and grow together on their professional and spiritual journeys. We invite the seniors to join the Adventist Young Professionals (AYP) network, which now boasts more than 5,000 active members. For the past two years, in partnership with AYP, we have hosted two annual conventions that gathered more than 450 young professionals from all over Texas and beyond. Through these events, we inspire, empower and connect young adults with a community that aligns with their professional interests and industries.

Last but not least, we foster a crucial connection with the local churches that want to become places where all generations grow and thrive together and have expressed a special interest in bonding with our young college students, young professionals, young couples and young families with children.

To this end, more than 25 churches are going through a Growing Young journey based on the book of the same name by Fuller Youth Institute. At least 30 Spanish churches have just recently stepped into #CreciendoJuntos. Offered in partnership with the Southwestern Union Conference, multiple generations and leaders come together to learn and literally grow together. Church members learn how to empathize deeply with each other and begin the crucial conversations necessary to reconcile and collaborate intergenerationally.

We pray that our churches in Texas Conference will continue to make every effort to deeply empathize, listen and journey together with the next generation.

We are in this together. We’re not called to grow apart. We want to be growing together.