Celebrating 25

Twenty-five years of changing lives to change the world! This is more than a slogan, a vision statement or a tagline – it is the legacy of TeenPact Leadership Schools as we look forward to the 2019 State Class season. What started in 1994 as a single class of 18 students in the Georgia State Capitol has blossomed into 60 classes in 45 states. This season we expect over 5000 Four Day and One Day State Class students, as well as 1000 participants at National Convention at Lee University. God is faithful!

Tens of thousands of students and parents have participated in TeenPact and have stories to share of the impact made in their lives. As we prepare to celebrate our 25th anniversary, I want to share a bit of my story and the impact this ministry has had on my family and me.

TeenPact Leadership Schools came to Connecticut in 2004 as the 30th state with a Four Day State Class. My wife, Lydia, and I sent our two oldest children – Paul and Ruth. Little did we know that we were starting down a path that would change the trajectory of our family in tremendous ways and for years to come. Paul was elected the first TeenPact Connecticut governor by one vote, and later discovered that the other candidate did not vote for himself, but voted for Paul. Ruth was elected as a Senator. Graduation was a great time as they both had a chance to share about how they were pushed outside their comfort zones to participate, pray in public, worship at the Capitol, and much more.

We invited the staff team to our home for dinner one night during the week and our family was introduced to the TeenPact “product” – high-caliber, spiritually-focused, God-centered, very mature teenaged leaders. That night was the beginning of the change for our family. We were “all in” and ready to do anything we could do to support the ministry, though we did not know that night all He would call us to do or how truly He would bless us.

Fast forward six years to National Convention 2010 at Fort Bluff in Tennessee. As I was introduced by Tim Echols as the new President/CEO of TeenPact Leadership Schools, I could see my family spread throughout the auditorium with their TeenPact friends from Connecticut, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Maine, Florida, Texas, Oregon, Iowa, and on and on. (Remember that I have eight children!) We had already been changed by the ministry and transformed by God to follow His calling wherever that might lead us—which included relocating to Richmond, Virginia.

As is true of thousands of TeenPact families, we have much to celebrate this time of year and look forward to the 2019 season. We celebrate 25 years of His faithfulness. We celebrate being in 45 states. We celebrate thousands of changed lives. And we celebrate a God who hears and answers prayers. But most importantly, we celebrate Jesus Christ with the words of Paul to the Philippians, “who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”