Thanks so much for taking a second to visit our webpage! Who are we? Well, as you may have noticed, our names are Luke and Michelle Stannard. We currently work with the high school ministry of Cru in Budapest, Hungary. That wasn’t always on our career planning list.
In fact, for most of Luke’s life he planned to be involved in medical research. As a result, he entered the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in the fall of 2006 in order to pursue a Mathematics/Pre-Medicine degree. During his time at UAB he became very involved in the local Cru ministry. In the summer of 2009, he had the opportunity to visit Hungary to help with a summer project put on by the Hungarian Cru ministry. Each year, a very large and very popular English camp called SpeakOut is used as a tremendous outreach tool. Over the 5 weeks that he spent at the camp, he had the chance to share the gospel with many students. Not only was God working through Luke, but He was also working in him. As the end of the camp neared, Luke very strongly sensed a desire to return to Hungary to be a part of the ministry there. Initially, he did his best to resist the urges, thinking they were nothing more than spiritual high after affects that would soon pass. However, as he entered my senior year of college, Luke realized the opposite was occurring. The feelings continued to grow and intensify. Finally, he decided to surrender to the prompting of God and applied for a year long internship in Budapest after graduating from UAB.
After spending a year in Hungary, Luke knew that this was exactly where God was leading me to go. As a result, he joined permanent staff with Cru in the fall of 2011, went through a series of new staff trainings, and returned to Hungary in August of 2012. Coincidentally (or was it?) that happened to be the same year that Michelle made the decision to intern in Hungary. Like Luke, Michelle did not set out in life to do missions work among the Hungarian youth. Rather, she grew up dreaming of hair styling and cosmetics. As a result, she moved to the Atlanta region in order to pursue her passion. And pursue she did! After attending hair styling school she launched into her career and turned a nifty profit. She had many opportunities along the way including managing her own salon.
It was while she was in Atlanta, that Michelle began attending a church which had a missions partnership with Cru in Hungary. During the fall of 2011, her church, North Metro, was seeking to send a team for a week long project. The initial outlook was a bit bleak with their team being one member short of the minimum number needed. Michelle heard the challenge for laborers to go and after some back and forth with God, she decided to take a leap of faith. Her week in Hungary left an enormous impact on her heart and even before coming back to the states she was already thinking about the possibility of returning. As a result, she made the decision to apply for a year long internship, leaving behind her stable job environment and the life she was comfortable in.
That fall, the fall of 2012 is when Luke and Michelle met for the first time. However, it wasn’t for another year and a half that they began dating. Michelle was into her second internship year (she loved it so much she decided to keep sticking around) and Luke was into his second year on permanent staff. After 6 months of dating, Michelle headed back to the states in order to go through the new staff training process which lead to a long distance relationship. Finally, just slightly over 1 year after they began dating, on December 26th, 2014, Luke popped the question. What followed was a crazy, hectic, and exciting engagement that culminated in a wedding on July 25th, 2015.
During our 11 years in student ministry in Hungary, we began to see a growing need for pastoral training and equipping. Churches throughout Europe are in a very dilapidated state. Routinely we heard students tell us that they learned so much more about Scripture with us than they ever did from their local church. As a parachurch ministry, it was a tremendous burden to hear that students were not seeing their churches as a place to be spiritually fed and nourished. Furthermore, it created unhealthy instances where students would replace local church attendance with attending Cru events. In addition, we personally experienced the challenge of attending a church that was very shallow spiritually. Our church is full of individuals who have a great heart for God and Scripture. In addition, our pastor is a fantastic shepherd and man who desires to see God’s kingdom advanced. However, Sunday after Sunday, we experienced sermons that rarely involved deep Scripture study and often only mentioned Scripture as an afterthought or misinterpreted passages to fit the content of the sermon. God used these experiences to give us a passion to see church leaders raised up who were equipped to properly handle the Word of God. We are genuinely convinced that the church situation in Europe is partially a product of bad theological teaching over the past century, inadequate seminary education and training, and a lack of theological resources for local pastors. We have also realized that having a strong student ministry is of little benefit if the local churches are ill equipped to continue pouring into our students.
As we began to explore the opportunities, God opened doors in Munich, Germany. Munich is the closest major city to Hungary, allowing us to maintain ministry connections. Additionally, the local church we will be partnering with has a common vision of desiring to transform the spiritually dead church scene through equipping, encouraging, training, and developing the next generation of church leaders. Martin Bucer Seminary, who we will be working alongside, is one of only a handful of solid, Reformed seminaries in Europe. Their study center model will allow us to impact students not only in Munich, but throughout Germany and other parts of Europe. We desire to see churches planted and revitalized to proclaim Scripture and lead people back to the truths contained in its pages. We believe that if transformation is to take place in Europe, it must begin within the church and involve the church leadership being grounded in the Word of God.
Luke and Michelle
Halfway Around the Globe 