Staff and Ministries
Henry & Jacque Bouma
Our work as Navigator Urban Youth Leaders in Grand Rapids, MI includes many diverse roles.
Over the course of a week, we lead a group of 9 high school students through a rigorous leadership program, training them to be leaders in their communities.
We also meet with and mentor younger youth leaders who are staff with Young Life, Youth for Christ, local churches and other youth ministries.
Developing the leaders on our team who mentor our teens, taking youth out for a meal so we can have time to listen to them one-on-one, and showing up at their sports and school events are some of our ministry roles.
In our not so spare time, we also pick up kids for school, from school, after sports practices, for work and after work. While it keeps us busy, it is also a great time to talk one-on-one with the kids.
We also host an urban youth bible study with teens from around the city. Providing Pizza, pop and snacks while having an opportunity to teach about God’s love is an amazing privilege!
We live in the same inner-city neighborhood as many of our urban teens, so God has shown us the food and housing insecurities, gang activity, drugs and violence our teens live with daily. There have been many tough days living here over the last 20 years, but we have also seen the richness and beauty of people living in community and taking care of their neighbors.
Jim and Jodi Bartels
Our family seeks to advance God’s Kingdom and share the good news of Jesus among urban youth and their families on the NE side of Grand Rapids, primarily among unchurched teens coming from poverty, brokenness, trauma, and hopelessness.
We establish relationships through living in the community and serving in the local schools. Our home is a safe hang out spot for students where the kool-aid flows, our basketball hoop sees lots of use, and we always offer a listening ear. After relationships are established, we do backyard bible clubs and teen bible studies as well as adventure style discipleship trips. We also help to create and serve in urban youth programs in collaboration with other ministries while seeking to equip, encourage, and empower their leaders. Our sweet spot though is in between these programs where we come alongside youth and their families to focus on long term life-on-life mentoring and discipleship with the goal of seeing disciple-making disciples.
Aaron Collier
My call is to work with urban youth, connecting with them in their environment and culture in order to tell them about God and His love for them. I want to do for them what was done for me; I want to be a mentor and an encouragement to them. I want to tell them they are not failures, and to let them know they are loved and they can be whatever they want to be in life. I want to be able to teach them how to be men of God.
My work with the teens includes creating and leading a bi-weekly Urban Youth Bible Study. I also meet 4 young men to do Life-to-life discipleship with them. I Partner with an inner-city Christian school to lead a discipleship program for 5 th graders and I teach a Christian Character- Building Program with 8 th grade boys at a local public school.
Walter & Kerrah Caballero
Hello! We are Walter & Kerrah Caballero, new I:58 Navigator staff in Grand Rapids, MI. Since 2018, we have co-labored with Navigator staff, Henry & Jacque Bouma and Aaron Collier, training urban teens to be leaders. In December 2022, the Lord put on our hearts to officially join The Navigators as Associate staff! We have a daughter named Mila and another girl on the way, due in December 2023.
This past year we have been hosting and helping lead RISE leadership group on Wednesday’s at our house. RISE is a two-year leadership program with a group of 8 urban youth from Grand Rapids, MI. We spend time in the word together at every meeting, ask and answer difficult questions according to God’s truth, and spend time learning what it takes to be a leader and disciple in today’s world. We hope that our student’s come out of our program equipped to face the hardships of this world with God as their shield, the Bible as their sword, and our leadership team and each other as soldiers to walk-alongside them in life. In addition to RISE, we have recently started SOMOS game night one Sunday a month at our house. This game night is set up as an opportunity to spend quality fun time with the youth we minister to but also acts as an outreach to urban youth that we have not been able to connect with through our Bible study or through RISE. Our goal with all that we do is to build healthy relationships with youth and raise them up to be the next generation of leaders in God’s army. We are excited to see how God can work through us through the end of this year and beyond.
Stories from Grand Rapids
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