The vision of the fund
Our vision is to help young people have adventurous experiences that will help them grow in their walk with God.
Getting out of your comfort zone and experiencing another situation where you have to rely on God is often a route to proving his adequacy in our lives.
Esther had many such adventures which she relished and, although unnerving at the time, proved God's ability to care for her and protect her. A desire to pursue your spiritual life on the edge is vital to this kind of experience and often it leads to a deepening in three specifici areas: spirituality, leadership and resilience.
Developing spiritually is often vastly underestimated and that's why we have it as the first priority. For many people spirituality is a rather nebulous thing to do with etherial qualities which are hard to pin down in the real world. In the Bible it is a much more down-to-earth facet of life. When Jesus was teaching his disciples just before his crucifiction he told them that another 'comforter' just like him, would come alongside the disciples to help them through the firestorm that was about to be unleashed on them. This term which Jesus used to describe the Holy Spirit was a word used of someone who comes alongside someone who is being challenged to help, support, encourage, motivate and protect them. Experiencing God in this way is one of the aims of the adventures we desire to support.
Enhancing latent leadership ability is another motive. So many young people are discouraged from being leaders by the responsibility that it carries and we want to help develop young leaders who can make an impact for God and for good in the world in later years.
Refining the capacity of resilience helps people develop their perseverance when life gets tough. EsIRther White's perseverance was legendry - in fact someone said of her 'to quit was never in Esther's vocabulary'. Being resilient in adverse circumstances is a life skill that can be developed at any age and often the only way to develop it is to test it. Like leadership you can only learn about resilience from text books, and while we believe that a clear understanding of it is vital, the quality itslef can only be developed under testing.
These are the qualities we hope to develop in young people's lives through the fund