A ministry lesson/perspective God has taught me over my years on staff is how much ministry partner development is really partner development. The need for funding may be the motivator to get us to meet with others but the relationships are the life blood to the partnership.
Jon Layton
IT Specialist
Boulder, Colorado
If Jon looks familiar it could be that you diligently read The Connection in which he has been featured at least 3 times. Jon was born on August 14, 1979 in California and raised in Livermore. (The California town, not the excessive organ.) Jon received Christ at a young age through his parents. He grew up in a Foursquare church on Sundays and played foursquare on the playground the rest of the week. "Just about everytime I would do something bad I would pray to receive Christ again." Through his teen years Jon worked through assurance of salvation and other Bibical truth to a budding walk with God.
As Jon went off to college at Chico State, God intercepted his life from the slippery slope of the party scene. After meeting a group of other freshmen on a bike tour of the Chico campus, Jon and his new found friends decided to check out one of the keggars publicized around campus. When they got to the party Jon noticed none of the other freshmen he had come with were imbibing. When asked why he was not drinking, Jon expressed it was because he was a Christian. His response set off a chain reaction for the rest of the group to "come out of their spiritual closet" and they discovered they were all believers looking for fun in all the wrong places. Their focus redirected from the party scene to finding a campus fellowship together and one of them had made a connection with Campus Crusade. After going to the first meeting Jon met Andy Armstrong and got involved in a freshman study and the rest is history.
A season of fruitfulness I most remember started my senior year at Chico state. I was one of only three men leading a Crusade Bible study that year. I led my study in my apartment with 7-8 underclassmen. Each week I would have a different guy in the group prepare and co-lead the study with me. Next fall I was back on campus to visit and went to a CRU leadership meeting. At one point in the meeting they asked all people who were leading Bible studies to stand. Everyone of the guys from my study the previous year stood up. That began a multiplication chain that went on for several years and at least 5 generations.
Joe Cross - you were the first to correctly identify the second Road of the Month in our Gravel Road competition. This rocky dirtway is found just outside of Mexico City. Thanks to Craig Johring and Andy McCullough who provided this "Colorado-esque" shot from Old Mexico. However, we are still awaiting further investigation and a judge's ruling to see if Joe should be disqualified for "secret knowledge" gained from team members.
We still have a copy of Francis Schaeffer's Trilogy to the first person who can guess the international landscape this gravel road is in. Another hint: we have a GPI partnership with this country.
