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Issue: Spring 2017 | Posted: June 1, 2017

Learning to Go

Union students learn and serve with Tampa church plant

By Nathan Handley ('15)

As Daniel Regan looked around the small sanctuary in Tampa, Florida, he saw people who were fully committed to Christ, the gospel and the local church. Regan and seven other 51���� students had spent their spring break working in Tampa with members of Covenant Life Church. They had started the week at the church’s Sunday morning service, and they were concluding it by gathering to remember Good Friday.

Between those services, Regan worked alongside church members in ministering to the homeless, caring for children, landscaping and prayer walking. He observed how they interacted with each other and with their community. As he watched, he began to think about his own role within the local church in Tennessee.

“I had this understanding that full-time ministry was a higher calling,” Regan says. “But in ministering and interacting with the people at Covenant Life, I really gained a better understanding of how the body of Christ is made up primarily of people who have another day job.”

Regan, a senior accounting major at Union, and his GO Trip teammates worked with Union alumnus Justin Perry, one of the pastors of Covenant Life Church, a church plant in south Tampa.

Perry says his goal for the week was to see the team grow in their love for God, for each other, for the city of Tampa and for the local church. Regan says that goal was accomplished.

Joey Bakeer, a senior cell and molecular biology major and another member of the Tampa team, says he also learned by watching the members of Covenant Life Church.

“Their faith isn’t just about themselves, but it affects the church, it affects the family, and it affects the city that they’re in, the city of Tampa,” Bakeer says. “Each decision they made was affected by their Christian faith.”

Bakeer says Tampa is a dark city, and Covenant Life clearly has a desire to see Tampa flourish spiritually. That’s a desire he wants to cultivate within himself as he prepares for the next stage of his life. He says he saw the importance of prayer as the team prepared to work. He says God prepared the hearts and minds of the team to be open to the work that was being done.

“We were not only praying alone, we were praying together in pairs and as an entire team,” Bakeer says. “We were all praying together for the work that would be done. There wasn’t just a work done in Tampa in the church and the people there. There was a work done in us as a team.”

Hannah Shea, a junior biology major, says the time spent in prayer and training was vital to her experience in Tampa. She says she wanted to grow in confidence in sharing her faith, and she saw that happen throughout the training process.

“We practiced talking to people and having spiritual conversations before we went, and we prayed together about it before,” Shea says. “I definitely saw my boldness in my faith grow through the process.”

Shea spent her time in Tampa knocking on the doors of strangers’ houses, serving food to the urban poor and surveying college students at the University of Tampa. She says the more she was pushed out of her comfort zone, the more she saw God work through conversations and interactions.

She says traveling with a team helped build her confidence and gave her encouragement through difficult and uncomfortable encounters.

“You knew the whole time that your team was in the same place you were,” she says. “They were just as nervous.”

Shea says after seeing the needs in Tampa, specifically the needs of the homeless, she has a greater desire to find the needs in her own city. She says she wants to continue putting herself in uncomfortable conversations in Jackson.

In addition to the Tampa team, Union sent out 46 other students on GO Trips designed to provide team-based opportunities to serve regionally, domestically and internationally. The teams served in Boston; Connecticut; Louisville, Kentucky; and Honduras. In the summer, 17 more students will go on trips to Salt Lake City, Ethiopia and East Asia.

Regan says the GO Trip gave him an avenue to share the gospel over spring break, but more importantly, it prepared him to share the gospel for the rest of his life and made him excited about how he can serve the local church.

“The GO Trip training isn’t just to prepare us to go on a mission trip,” he says. “It’s to prepare us to go for the rest of our lives.”