Young Adult Ministry Spotlight
Hello Hope Church Family!
My name is Anna Otto and I serve as the Connections Coordinator here at Hope Presbyterian Church. When I came on staff in May of 2021 I knew there were lots of possibilities for what I could do to help bring our community together while serving in this role; one that was unexpected and yet a longing of mine was for there to be a Young Adults Life Group.
After graduating from college in 2019 and moving back home to Winston, I quickly noticed the lack of community for young adults in the church and was honestly quite baffled by it given the number of colleges, graduate, law, and medicine programs in the area that I knew were filled with people my age – they just didn’t seem to be in the churches I was visiting. I knew I could not possibly be the only young adult looking/hoping for a community of peers! Some time during 2020 my Grandpa started telling me that I should start a young adults small group and I always told him that I didn’t want to start a group, I wanted to join a group that was already established. God has a sense of humor. A couple of months after I started working at Hope I told Ethan I would like to start a Young Adults Life Group – I decided that since I couldn’t find a young adults community, I would create a young adult life group in hopes that community would find me.
After months of planning, dreaming and praying, we had our first Young Adults Life Group meeting on September 29th, 2021. Since then it has been a joy to grow in community with these fellow young adults – we gather every other Wednesday to share a meal together, have fellowship time, and very slowly work our way through the book of Mark verse by verse (we joke that we will no longer be “young adults” by the time we finish Mark, because in seven-and-a-half months we have finished four chapters).
This group has been a bigger blessing to me than I ever could have dreamed of – it is truly the answer to so many prayers, and it is all God’s doing. Pray that God would continue to grow this community and use it to deepen our relationships with our peers and Himself. A dream of mine is to connect people within the young adult life group with those who are older and wiser, who would be interested in mentoring them.
If you are interested in joining the group, would like to know more about the group, or are interested in mentoring one of the young adults in the group contact me, Anna Otto: connections@hopechurchws.org.