On the Horizon: Taking College Students into Urban Los Angeles to Encounter God

This summer, I will be stepping into a new role as the associate director of InterVarsity’s Los Angeles Urban Project, aka: LAUP. LAUP may be the single most powerful leadership experience that we offer college students in Los Angeles today.

Students spend the summer as LAUP interns, and are placed in teams who will live in the inner city. They spend their summer working with urban ministries and justice organizations—Boys and Girls Clubs, Union Rescue Mission, Inner City churches—and being led and trained in prayer, character, and a Biblical perspective on money and economics. During LAUP, students experience working through relational conflict, they learn to find hope in the midst of poverty, and they gain vision for what it means to fully live as Christians in our culture. On the other side of LAUP students come out with maturity, character, and an understanding of the world that makes them the kind of people who will shape their churches, neighborhoods, and places of work for the rest of their lives.

My sense is that participating in the leadership of LAUP—particularly the way it makes space for God to work at the intersection between college students and poor communities of Los Angeles—may be one of the most satisfying leadership experiences I have with InterVarsity.