Pardon Our Dust: Facing Your Future is under construction

For seventeen years, Calvin Seminary has offered Facing Your Future (FYF) to high school seniors and recent graduates in order to help them discover their gifts and callings. This program, generously supported by Lilly Endowment and church offerings, has also given participants solid biblical grounding in Reformed theology and piety through instruction and encouragement from Seminary faculty and seminarians.

Today many FYF graduates are actively involved in professional ministry as pastors, church planters and missionaries; as theologians and teachers. Others serve faithfully as elders and deacons while also cultivating God’s Kingdom in a range of professional callings.

In the last three years, Calvin Seminary has welcomed six new faculty members and a brand new admissions team so it seemed best to us to pause for a year in order to seek their ideas and advice about how to frame the next chapter of FYF to serve future servants for Christ’s global church in a dramatically changing world. We have suspended the FYF program for this one-year “sabbatical” in order to review, rethink, and redesign this engagement experience for late teens.

In the next few months, we will be unveiling the new and improved FYF. Based on our listening sessions with a range of stakeholders of the program – ministry leaders, FYF alumni, and high school students—we already know that key changes will include more focused and sustained engagement between each FYF participant, their vocational mentor, home church, and Calvin Seminary. We want to do more to support FYF graduates as they plug back into ministry in their home communities. Stay tuned for more updates as we look forward to our 2017 re-launch.