Inside Story
Return On Investment
Team effort pays off in Alabama
By Rebecca K. Grosenbach
In 1999, Matt Letourneau’s high school football coach encouraged him to check out The Navigators when he transferred to Auburn (Alabama) University his sophomore year of college. “My daughter is on staff,” Coach said.
Matt answered politely but laughed to himself, Yeah, whatever!
Yet his devotion to his coach prompted Matt to give it a go. There he
met the coach’s daughter, Lindy Black, who with her husband, Vic, led
the campus ministry. Matt’s attitude quickly changed. He got plugged
into the ministry, later joined Navigator staff, and never looked back.
Today, he and his wife, Julie, lead a ministry at the University of
Alabama.The Letourneaus’ story is a lesson in the value of investing deeply in people’s lives. “At Auburn, I got connected with guys—especially associate staffer Nick Shimoda—at a critical point in life,” Matt recalls.
After Matt’s graduation from Auburn in 2001, he started a staff-training program at Pennsylvania State University. He worked with Navigators Dave and Cathy Bowman and a group of other interns. Matt and Julie, who had met at Auburn, married in 2002.
In the fall of 2004, the Letourneaus’ time at Penn State was coming to an end. They were asked to restart a ministry at the University of Alabama, where The Navigators had worked 20 years ago. They didn’t want to go alone, but there wasn’t anyone on staff available to join them. So they turned to the team at Penn State.
“We had a core of students we had invested in for four years, and we asked them to put off their careers for a couple years and help us,” Matt says. “We asked one EDGE Corps member to come with us, and asked four students to join EDGE Corps and help us at Alabama. They all said yes.” EDGE Corps is a program for recent college graduates where they commit one to two years to Navigator campus ministry.
Without this team support, the work at Alabama would have proved daunting. “We were told that of the 25,000 students there, only between 750 and 1,000 of them were in church or a campus ministry,” Matt recalls.
In the fall of 2005, the Letourneaus and their team of EDGE Corps workers launched the Navigator ministry at Alabama. They started by “just hanging out” at a men’s dorm and a women’s dorm. The team conducted spiritual surveys to help identify where students were in their spiritual journeys. They also invited students to come to the Letourneaus’ house to watch Alabama football. By the end of the first year they had a handful of students who were studying the Bible together; one guy had come to Christ.
From the beginning Matt knew it would be a challenge to create groups of students who could overlook their differences and focus on Christ. The school has some long-held divisions, such as the gulf between students who belong to Greek fraternities and those who don’t.
“Greeks have a look, an
attitude,” Mark says. The fraternities go so far as to tell freshmen
what restaurants they can patronize and who to vote for in student
elections.The school also faces racial tension. “When we got here, our hope was to bridge the divide between people,” Matt says. “Ephesians 2:14 says Christ tears down the ‘dividing wall of hostility.’ That’s what we as a staff began praying for our students.”
And they’re seeing God work. Today, Greeks and non-Greeks, blacks and whites, are studying the Bible together. “We have a weekly large-group meeting with 60 people, and about 90 students involved in Bible studies,” Matt says. “We have Bible studies in Greek houses now. One senior, Bradford, who is Greek, leads a group of four younger guys in his fraternity who are reading the Bible for the first time.”
Next fall will be a critical time for the Letourneaus, as that original group of EDGErs from Penn State ends their tenure at Alabama. Some may stay at Alabama, but Matt expects others to move on. “That’s how it should be,” Matt admits. The investments made in these young people from the time they were at Penn State until now will yield dividends across God’s work in the years to come.
Click here for more information on the Collegiate and EDGE Corps ministries of The Navigators.
Cover and article photos: Tim Mitchell
