Partner Testimonials

One thing a lot of people don’t know about APU is that we have a huge short term missions program. Every year, we help over 5000 high school and college students engage in cross cultural missions on the border of Mexico and California. Our Center for Student Action helps 200+ more students a year do short-term missions all over. And we have over 300 students each year who participate in a study abroad program.

About 10 years ago, we realized we needed to do more to help our graduating seniors connect their major and their global experience with their first step after college. So we created the HIS years global cohort program. Seniors can apply for HIS years in the Fall of their senior year. HIS years does a weekend retreat and then has weekly meetings in the second semester centered on helping seniors connect with and prepare for a two year missions placement.

Early on, we found that we didn’t have the time to find the kinds of global placements that our seniors need. We had lots of students in our HIS years cohort, but the missions agencies would take years to get them through the process. And then we found GoCorps! GoCorps has been a natural fit for our HIS years program. In fact, now all of our HIS years students are placed exclusively through GoCorps.

GoCorps has helped us take a vision to see a lot more of our grads to serve in missions after graduation by providing ways that students can use their degree, be mentored as well as receive special funding for their student loans. So far, we’ve placed 100 students to use their degree among the unreached for two years. And we’re just getting started. And we’re so glad that we have a partner in GoCorps to help us achieve our vision! 

  - Matt Browning, Director of Graduate and Professional Student Engagement, Azusa Pacific University

Our mission at Campus Outreach is: “Glorifying God by building laborers on the college campus for the lost world.” Through evangelism and discipleship, we want to help students build foundation of the gospel and use that as a tool to help them reach the lost world. We want them to understand that whatever their major and wherever God would lead the, they have a part to play in the Great Commission We always want to make sure they understand that the gospel works in them first, and then through them in the pursuit of the lost world. The purpose of Campus Outreach Minneapolis is to reach the world for Christ by mobilizing laborers to proclaim the Gospel throughout the world. Our vision is that trained graduates would provide leadership in every sphere of influence )the church, medicine, community, business, education, missions, etc.) at home and around the world.

GoCorps has a great range of options for students to use their gifts, skills and majors in a cross-cultural context overseas, which is beautiful. It’s not just as simple as saying “go be a missionary” but to educate the students to use the gifts God has given them. What is unique about GoCorps is that they provide the opportunities and work in partnership with us to fulfill the last part of our mission statement: “for the lost world”. GoCorps comes alongside us to say “here are some unique opportunities for your students to use their gifts to reach the lost world.”

We have specifically seen 7 students sent out through GoCorps over the past 2 years as a direct result of this partnership. Many were participating in Bible studies and other discipleship activities on two of our campuses. As a result of this partnership, GoCorps has brought awareness in a new way to our students. They have come alongside what we’re already trying to do, rather than asking us to recreate new programming. They are not trying to add things to our campus calendar but asking what we are already doing and working with us to flavor it with a global focus. GoCorps’ posture is clearly one of “how can we help”, and they want to help our students find their place, even if it’s not directly with GoCorps. GoCorps serves to fan into flame God’s calling for their life, and it’s clear the goal is to not force someone where God isn’t already calling them but to create awareness where students don’t already know about these types of options. Simply put, GoCorps is extending our ministries’ reach to those in the lost world and we are encouraged to see this partnership grow.

  – Reid and Nikki Jilek, North Area Directors, Campus Outreach Minneapolis

I met Paul Van Der Werf at a restaurant in Rochester, Minnesota. We dreamed of what it would look like to see 100 Urbana participants engaged as GOERS on 2-year vocational internships with GoCorps following what we expected to be Urbana 21. (I’d had my eye on GoCorps since learning about them at Urbana 15 when I was there with Wycliffe as an exhibitor. There are many things I love about how they do what they do -- more than I can include in this post.) I approached what might be a collaboration with GoCorps

• knowing that I wanted Urbana to challenge students and recent grads to invest themselves in something more than a short-term mission trip.
• knowing that we were going to highlight the diversity of ways we are invited to live out our collective calling as God’s witnesses to the ends of the earth in all manner of vocational scenarios
• knowing that I wanted to point these young adults to pathways of exploration where they would receive the kinds of training and support all along the way that would make the way for them to thrive.

I knew all of these things, and also knew that Urbana is not designed (or called) to be a sending agency.

At the same time, Paul and his team were realizing that they’d proven the concept of their systems and strategies to send vocational interns for 2-years as goers to all sorts of places and contexts in the world. They were ready to scale up.

We continued the conversation over the next months, weathering the complexities of a COVID postponement, agreeing to walk together into this venture. We both identified God’s direction and provision in this relationship.

GoCorps did the work to scale up — to be ready with more staff, more options, more funding to serve 2x to 3x the Goers they’d served in any year previously.

Urbana made sure GoCorps was highlighted appropriately in the plenary sessions (including both a video and a testimony — both that fit the program design without their reference to GoCorps). GoCorps was also highlighted in the conference handbook and app and advertising.

Time will give us an opportunity to know more of the story of how God used this collaboration for his glory and the good of the nations. At the moment I can tell you that nearly 20% of the students at Urbana had a meaningful enough conversation with a GoCorps rep that they shared their contact information with GoCorps so the conversation can continue and more than 200 students who will graduate this year are among those. Join me in asking the Lord of the harvest to send many of these as harvest workers through GoCorps in the next two years.

- Ruth Hubbard, Vice President, Urbana at InterVarsity USA