Christian Commitment
Champions for Christ As Liberty celebrates 40 years of Christian Commitment, students, faculty, staff and longtime supporters of the university continue to make their mark as Champions for Christ. Below are excerpts of stories from around campus. To view the full versions, including more photographs and some video interviews, go to www.liberty.edu/libertyjournal. ACCELERATING THE COMPLETION OF THE GREAT COMMISSION Liberty University’s Center for Global Engagement plans to do everything they can “to reach the world in this generation” and especially so through an innovative and newly revised curriculum that will be launching this year. The Global Studies degree program, which was previously deemed Intercultural Studies, will now provide special training to students who intend on living as Christians in different cultures while also maintaining a secular occupation.
The program, which will encourage a double major or minor in an “occupational skill” (such as business, education, teaching English as a second language or nursing) will equip Liberty University alumni to live and work in the heart of the world’s least reached places. Like the Apostle Paul, who often made tents for a living, these Liberty graduates will be able to go to places and reach people who have been typically inaccessible to traditional missionaries, and do it without being tethered to financial supporters in their home country.
STUDENT’S RECOVERY FROM NEAR-FATAL CAR WRECK EMPOWERS HER MINISTRY
(TOP) Graduate student Julie Stillwagon traveled with a Liberty team to Rwanda in November 2011 to aid genocide victims. (ABOVE) Liberty students work at a camp for orphaned children in the Middle East last year.
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Jennifer Barrick, a 20-year-old Women’s Ministry major, has had the opportunity to share her testimony of God’s grace in her life at Liberty and around the country. After surviving a near-fatal car wreck on Nov. 5, 2006 in which Jennifer and her parents, Andy and Linda, and younger brother Josh were hit head-on from a drunk driver going 80 miles per hour a mile from their home, Jen’s life drastically changed. Not expecting to live through the night, she was in a coma for five weeks. Jennifer, 15 years old when the wreck occurred, suffered brain damage, but her spiritual side was not affected at all. While for a time she couldn’t even understand what a shoe or toothbrush was used for, she could recite all the Bible verses