I knew early on as I discerned a call to ministry that discipleship would be the center of my calling. I wasn’t particularly gifted speaking from a stage, nor was I drawn to doing so. Instead, I saw God work the most dramatically in the intimate smaller group settings of training, mentorship, confession, authenticity, and obedience. 

I began my vocational ministry career by moving across Virginia to a city where I knew almost no one as a newly married 23-year-old. I didn’t really know what I was doing in ministry or discipleship, but I showed up to meet with, mentor, and share Jesus’ love with college students anyway. 

The insecurity in that season came on very strong. I would spend an hour or so with students with no true direction, plan, or vision for what the meeting should eventually produce. My insecurity and general lack of knowledge about what I was doing spurred me to use the gifts that God had given me to learn and grow from others. I learned from speakers, authors, teachers, and blogs. I tried to train and mentor the younger college students from those resources. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I took what I was learning from the professionals and tried to make it relevant to college students.

It didn’t produce fantastic results in the hearts of others, but it didn’t fall flat either. I was definitely at least pursuing others; whether or not I was making them into passionate disciples is another question. I continued like this over the years, getting slowly better at it, but still feeling like I didn’t have a full understanding of how I should develop people, where they should go and just feeling mostly in over my head with all the discipleship resources that are out there. 

One thing that I loved about my time in my Uptick cohort was that the leaders helped me walk away with a simplified and clarified vision of discipleship. 

I can still hear Paul Machonachie and his British accent on that very first day at Roslyn Retreat Center back in 2021: “The essential competency to being a follower of Jesus is being able to hear his voice and do what He says.”

It was so simple, but so profound. 

He was right. Scripture is clear about this. Jesus is clear about this. John 14:15 says that if we love Jesus, then we will obey his commandments. 

Then, Paul followed up by saying, “We often think the Christian life is complicated and easy, but what it really is, is simple but hard.” 

These two simple yet profound sayings illuminated the problem of discipleship for me: I didn’t have an exact vision. I started out too loose, and then I ended up rigid and too complicated, presenting material that wasn’t always helpful for the stage of faith of the disciple. Paul and the leaders of Uptick helped clarify what discipleship should be able to do: connect the disciple with God Himself and help them do the things that Jesus did. 

These simple but profound teachings have changed the ways that our ministry, now at James Madison University, mentors, trains and equips our college students on their walk with Jesus during their university years. For so often, I kept looking for ways to complicate the discipleship process, bringing in “impressive” and “complicated” theological topics to talk about and challenge, but when it really comes down to it, it’s not about complicated or impressive theology: it’s about knowing God, hearing Him, and doing His word by living the Kingdom life. 

At JMU BCM, after almost every event, every Bible study, every retreat, every discipleship meeting, you’ll hear one of our staff members asking students and those that they’re leading: “So, what is God saying to you, and what are you going to do about it?” We celebrate stories of others hearing God’s voice, and doing something about it. It’s now ingrained as a part of our healthy, thriving culture of college student disciples at JMU, a group that has grown from 0 students when we began in 2021 to a little over 40 at the end of 2025. 

We look forward to continuing to create Jesus-shaped leaders as we do the simple yet hard tasks and disciple students in a personal, active, obedient relationship with God. I’ll always be thankful for the ways that Uptick shaped our vision, language and heartbeat, which is really just the heartbeat of God Himself.