Youths get the message of hope

YOUTHS from the Nazarene Church at 5-Mile, Port Moresby, have been challenged to examine their personal lives to see how they are growing in faith with God.
A team of five students and staff from the Youth with a Mission (Ywam) discipleship training school in Wisconsin, United States, visited and encouraged the youths at their church orientation night on Friday.
The team comprised of Ywam staff Kayla Burik and Becky Farneth, and student team leaders Sydney Dodson, Caleb Pflueger and Maddie Meyers. They spoke about the importance of forgiveness, prayer, God’s love, relationship with God and how they could grow with God in serving others with their physical positive deeds in life.
“We’ve been in Papua New Guinea since January 4 and we come from the discipleship training school in Wisconsin,” Burik told The National.
She said their training school offered a six-month programme for youths who wanted to learn and know more about God.
“In the first three months, we learn the concept of who God is and we discuss topics about God, fatherhood of God, how to hear God’s voice, spiritual warfare, and other bunch of different topics about God.”
Burik said the next two months were outreach-based and they would split into different teams and go to different countries to share what they had learnt.
“When we arrived in the country last month, we have been to Lae, to Mount Hagen and then we came here to do our discipleship duties,” she added.
Farnet said they went through a prayer process to decide on a country. They heard of Papua New Guinea from a team that was here a couple of years ago, so they decided to come to this country for the outreach phase of the study.
“One important thing in our vocation is having to be Holy Spirit-led and each time when we want to hold a programme we need to pray about what God wants us to do so that his Holy Spirit will guide us to do that,” Burik said.
“The message I want to share with the rest of PNG youths is hope.
“So I would like to encourage everyone to ask God what’s next and whether they just started a relationship with God, whether they had a relationship with God for a long time.
“Ask God for guidance in their life and understanding the hope that God has for the plans that he has in their life.”
Burik said her message was to encourage youths in the country to build relationships with God, take the time to sit down and get to know who he was and learn about his character and being able to hear him and recognise what he was saying in order to step out and do what he was calling them for to live good and positive lives.