Teen Mania Ministries is celebrating 25 years of sending young people on foreign missions trips through its Global Expeditions program, which has taught thousands of teenagers that they don't have to wait until they are adults in order to be used by God.
"The 25th anniversary for Teen Mania, I don't think it's a congratulations to us. It's just another sign that God is insisting that his mission gets accomplished," Ron Luce, founder and president of Teen Mania, told The Christian Post on Thursday.Luce and his wife, Katie, started the Garden Valley, Texas-based ministry with the understanding that adults aren't the only ones who can be used by God, and teens don't need a high school diploma to make an impact on the world.
"When we first started, very few people were taking teenagers on missions trips. People would look at us and go, 'You want to take kids where? They can't remember to put their socks on, you want them to remember their passport?'" Luce told The Christian Post on Thursday.
Despite their passion, however, the Luce's decision to work with teenage missionaries wasn't easy. They were torn by their convictions to both reach young people in the U.S. and to work in foreign missions, Luce says, so they prayed for clarity and eventually God showed them that they could do both at the same time.
Since that time, around 70,000 teenagers have participated in Global Expeditions trips, Luce says, and nearly 1.5 million people have received Christ as a result of the witness of these young missionaries. Since its founding in 1987, the program has sent missionaries to over 69 different countries, and this year alone it will send 2,000 young people to 33 countries on six different continents.
"Every place we go we're teaching young people to share their faith in Christ, which, ironically, is a distinction that's not all so common on short-term mission trips now. There's a lot of 'let's go and do good things for people but not necessarily share our faith,' and...we want every single young person to lead people to Jesus," said Luce.
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