Each year, several Gateway students participate in Beyond Trips; overseas missions experiences that consist of hands-on cross-cultural experiences, coaching from from local Christian leaders and long-term missionaries, and classroom experience with Gateway faculty. This year, I led a Beyond Trip to Eastern Europe. The students and I worked alongside emerging Eastern European leaders, not to deliver a program but to learn, serve, and lead together. We also hiked through the Caucasus Mountains—the trail was a demanding shared environment where students demonstrated character, judgment, trust, and teamwork. It became the context in which we learned and practiced Christian leadership and cross-cultural engagement.

Georgia’s churches need a rising generation of pastors, worship leaders, evangelists, administrators, and disciple-makers prepared to lead with biblical conviction and practical wisdom. Likewise, America is in need of a generation of pastors and leaders who are defined by the gospel, biblical fidelity, and tireless adherence to the Great Commission. On this Beyond Trip to Eastern Europe, students worked through a number of critical elements of Christian leadership alongside young leaders.

THE WEEK AT A GLANCE

Seven Days in Georgia

Leadership Under Pressure

The team practiced self-leadership, resilience, decision-making, and care for others when conditions were challenging on the trail.

Cross-cultural Team Development

We worked on careful listening, clear communication, and shared responsibilities across language and culture.

Reproducible Leadership

We invested in leaders who can disciple others and strengthen churches in Georgia long after the trip ends. Likewise, those same leaders invested in us to help Gateway students return to their churches as effective disciple-makers with global perspectives on God’s love for the world.

The Leadership Framework

As part of the educational aspect of this trip, we explored a number of themes twice: once led by the American team and once by Georgian leaders. Teaching moved into discussion, and discussion moved into shared experiences on the trail.

Mission

Lead with a clear center.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Colossians 1:19–20

God’s mission gives leaders purpose, focus, and the means to order priorities.

Identity

Lead from security in Christ.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 

Galatians 2:20

Healthy leadership grows from who Christ is forming us to be, not performance, achievements, fear, or the approval of others.

Multiplication

Develop leaders who develop others.

And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also. 

2 Timothy 2:2

The mission advances when leaders intentionally entrust responsibility to faithful people.

Family

Lead first at home.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie own, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6:6–9

Public leadership cannot outrun private faithfulness. The home is the first place leadership is lived.

A Classroom with No Walls

The team spent four days moving point-to-point through mountains, forest, and exposed ridgelines. This environment was punctuated with leadership sessions; cross-cultural lectures and discussion times between Georgians leaders and Gateway students on leadership, church ministry, spiritual developtment, and more.

Leadership formation happened in formal sessions, over meals, on steep climbs, during rest stops, and in the countless decisions required to move as one team.

The trek ended in Mtskheta. The relationships, convictions, and leadership practices formed along the way continue into churches, ministries, classrooms, and homes.