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A story of collaboration between the GOVERNMENT, the POLICE and the CHURCH  which led to hundreds of thousands of gospel exposures, thousands of changed lives and mobilized believers.

YOUTH AT THE THRESHOLD OF LIFE

In 1994 we got connected with the National AIDS-coordinator, Dr. Dénes Bánhegyi. He asked us to help prevent the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Hungary by putting together a program for educators and youth experts on how to deal with youth-problems. We told him that our conviction is that the only real solution for all of todays problem (drug, promiscuous sex, AIDS, alcohol, etc.) is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We shared with him that the program we put together has to be built on that conviction. Although he is not a Christian, he agreed with us in that and he opened an incredibly door for us. We developed a tool called "Youth at the Threshold of Life" to train educators on how to deal with youth-problems from a biblical point of view. As of today our curriculum is a three-volume, 1000 pages long teachers manual that deals with relationship and character building, AIDS- and drug-prevention. The curriculum has 57 classroom lectures, 27 reading assignments and 5 game-collections along with 5 videos and two other books From the educators point of view this is an effective educational program to help prevent risky behaviors. From our point of view it is an excellent tool to share the gospel with educators and students.

YTL now is accredited by the Ministry of Education and it is an official training program for educators.

Amazingly after 20 years and 23 nationwide symposium over 8,000 educators are reached and trained at the week-end long YTL symposiums. 80 percent of them are non-believers and the symposium is the first time when they hear a clear presentation of the gospel with an opportunity to receive Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord.

What is most surprising is that these non-believer teachers are not just using the YTL curriculum but 75 percent of them are showing the Jesus film in their classrooms, too. Over 250,000 students in Hungary saw the Jesus video in their classrooms because of YTL.

YTL has been developed in Hungary and now it is used in 62 other countries of the World.

YTL STUDENT MINISTRIES

Reaching today the leaders of tomorrow! 

Almost every students grew up without any knowledge of Jesus in our post-communist country. They are very hungry for the gospel and most of them wants to talk about God.

Every year we give out about 10,000 Evangelistic Student Survival Kits (SSK) to freshmen in the Universities. Because of YTL we get special permission to distribute those even in campuses where normally they don’t allow any Christian activities. A survey is attached to the SSK that the students need to fill out. In this survey we ask them if they would like to talk with someone about God! Every year at least 1,000 students give their contact information and indicates that they would like to talk with someone about God. We meet with each one of them personally through the semester. Many of them are becoming Christians.

There are many other outreaches we have for campus students. We use YTL lectures in clubs and follow it up with a new club-strategy called “Story of the Soul” (SOTS) which was developed in Hungary as well. This is an interactive coffeehouse where we talk about the needs of the soul and what their soul is saying to them. 65% of the students who prayed to receive Christ prayed at that event. Check out our SOTS website: www.storyofthesoul.org

Beside of evangelism we emphasize personal discipleship, too. Every students are involved in small groups and someone is responsible for them. There are special events to accelerate discipleship, like student retreats.

After starting YTL and getting a lot of access to high school students with the support of their educators we wanted to utilize and maximize this credibility and open door. The main goal of our ministry is to evangelize and make disciples mainly among the future leaders. God opened the door for us greatly in the high schools. We regularly give lectures in dozens of classrooms every semester. The students are very much opened to talk about these topics we address in the YTL curriculum. 

This gave us a great opportunity to start a direct evangelistic and discipleship ministry among high school students. We started to gather them in YTL clubs and work with those who received Christ. Later we had special events, clubs, weekly meetings.

Today about 130 students are coming to our weekly YTL meeting every Friday night. Also, we have twice a semester a special YTL outreach for high school students called “Winner Take All”. Hundreds are showing up. Right now 31 students are involved in our Student Leadership Team. These are students who became Christians with us through YTL ministry and are committed to share their faith weekly.

Another major outreach for our YTL student ministry is the YTL summer camp, called “Speak Out”. We invite Hungarian students to come and learn English in a summer camp setting. These are non-Christian students who are coming and we advertise it through the YTL educators. We invite American college students to come and help teach English to them using the YTL topics and curriculum.

Each year about 300 non-Christian students are spending weeks with us and they not just hear the gospel in many ways but they see it in action through the lives of the American students and our Hungarian student disciples. We see many students praying to receive Christ at these camps and remaining fruit.

YTL & THE POLICE

The program YTL, the Policy and the Presbyterian Church started, called "Contrast exhibition" had a big start in two major cities. In each city we held a press-conference and basically all the important media were present. Important government, political and religious leaders were speaking. It even made it to the evening news in the national television and there were many other reports showed in TVs and radios. In many of these interviews it is openly mentioned that the gospel is a part of this exhibition.

Thousands of Students are gathered every week

Students between ages of 14-18 in these cities are required to come to this exhibition as part of their classroom activities. But before that each school organizes a special seminar for them and we travel down to speak to these students on Why wait?. Also we train the educators - and give them reason why they should allow Christianity to be promoted and a Christian-based program, like YTL to be used in their classrooms. We had incredible discussions and saw great openness - they are so hopeless, they don't know what to do and how to deal with youth problems.

In a short two weeks we've already gave talks and opportunity to hear the gospel to 4,000 students and 300 educators. These events are organized by the schools and we just have to go there and speak. 

Opportunities generate more opportunities

Two universities offered us to teach courses in their universities and train campus students on YTL for credit!!! This means that they allow campus students to get credit to come to a class where they will hear the gospel!!! WOW! 1Cor 1:26-29 is truly become reality - God is using the fools, us...

Next year the government wants to take this exhibition nation-wide and bring it to Budapest. They'll provide the resources for the exhibition and we need to provide the speakers for the student's and educator's seminars! 

Also, we had been asked by the government to help develop a curriculum for schools to prepare kids for family life. We've developed a possible strategy of such program and that had been published and distributed by the government to every school already - in 5000 copies. On November 5th, we'll introduce this in a conference for professionals.