The Joyful Heralds

Josiah’s story so far…

Josiah has been involved with Cru since 2005. He was invited by his older brother to a local Cru meeting at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). God used the local Cru at UNH (Cru UNH) to show him what a Christian community looked like, to challenge him to be living a life that doesn’t hide the sin from the community he’s involved in. Josiah stayed with Cru UNH while he was in and out of college, both for his Associates degree (received in 2007) and his Bachelors degree (received in 2013).

Josiah volunteered to help with planning weekly meetings, running weekend getaways, playing bass on the praise team. He helped lead small groups and was later volunteer staff at Cru UNH, as he started raising support for an internship with Cru. He would meet Rebecca while on a weekend trip, called a Preview Weekend, to Cru’s headquarters in Orlando, Florida. He and Rebecca became friends over the next couple years. Josiah’s internship didn’t work out, but God had convicted him to pursue whatever he could to use his skills for building God’s kingdom.

Josiah joined a church plant in a nearby town. While Josiah was helping with the newly formed church, Rebecca and Josiah started dating and soon they found themselves engaged! They talked a lot about the future, particularly where God would lead them to minister together. After a lot of prayer and talking with each other, God independently lead both of them to the idea that Josiah should join Cru as a full-time supported staff member (Rebecca was already on staff with Cru). After applying for staff, having his application for staff accepted, and getting married on January 1st, 2017, the two of them moved into ministry with Cru together.

Over the next couple years, Josiah and Rebecca would work on support raising, reporting to our teams in August of 2019. Since then, Josiah has been working to support Cru’s IT infrastructure. He’s been gaining responsibilities as a Systems Administrator. He manages and supports various Windows Servers within Cru’s VMware environment, as well as manages local email systems, authentication systems, and is in the process of learning new technologies and methods to support cloud systems.

Rebecca’s story so far…

Rebecca was a freshman and new Christian in 2010 when she met a small group of faithful believers on the University of New Mexico campus. She came to know them as UNM-Cru—her Cru. She was eager to learn more about the God who’d just started opening her eyes to His sweet grace, and the group comprised students her age in the same boat as well as staff members in their mid-twenties who enjoyed discussing and teaching about spiritual things. It was in this context that the Gospel first blew her away.

Cru’s key focuses are giving those who don’t know Christ the opportunity to know Him, as well as helping those who call themselves Christians to learn more about His justice and love. The more Rebecca learned about the gifts of freedom and security and peace and reconciliation and all that came with Christ, the more she wondered if others knew—and if they didn’t, she had to tell them. This sort of love could change anyone’s life.

However, she was also studying journalism, a field she’d been passionate about and committed to for years. As she neared her college graduation, she prayed about her future, asking God if He’d rather she be a missionary for Him or a journalist. In her mind, both were important, but it made the most sense to work for people to know God. He was eternal. This life was not.

But at a Cru event about a year before graduating, she received an invitation to the ministry’s headquarters in Orlando, FL. She didn’t know why Cru would extend an invitation to her, but she wasn’t about to refuse. In February 2013, she walked corridors of headquarters and was amazed to learn that the organization she’d only ever known as her small, studious group was actually an international organization umbrella’d over 30+ smaller ministries which served everyone from the military to families to students to professional athletes in nearly every country in the world.

She remembers, in particular, an interactive map of the world connected to Cru’s various websites. The map, the students were told, lit up red whenever anyone read the Gospel story on one of Cru’s sites and wanted to enter a relationship with God. It lit up yellow if someone asked to be connected to a Christian mentor in the U.S. She stood amazed as she watched the maps light up with red and yellow dots all over the Middle East, Asia, and Northern Africa. She thought, “I want to be a cog in this wheel.”

She learned shortly thereafter that storytellers and journalists were needed to write for these websites, as well as other publications like their magazine and newsletters—it was part of how they reached the world for God. In 2014, Rebecca interned for the Writers Team as a missionary journalist for Cru; by the end of the internship, in 2015, she joined full-time staff.

While telling friends, family and acquaintances her story, and asking if they’d like to join her prayer team, she ran across a friend she met that first weekend at headquarters. She and Josiah began talking and soon fell in love. It was clear to them that God was asking them to be a family that would serve Him and those He loved. And that is what they strive to do today.

——————————————————————————-

It’s been an incredible journey so far and we welcome you to join us!