Growing a Quality Team

Growing a Quality Team

by | Mar 7, 2025 | Letter from the Director, Thrive

MBI is one of hundreds of global campuses in YWAM’s network. Our sole purpose is to provide practical and training support for other locations so they can thrive and fully realize their mission goals.

MBI’s ability to offer extraordinary services to our missionary counterparts relies on our quality staff. Our team consists of experienced long-term missionaries who know the ropes and understand the challenges of serving on the field.

We want to introduce you to the four incredible YWAM missionaries who recently joined us, allowing us to offer even more help than before.

The construction of Mission Lodge—MBI’s all-in-one center for refreshing, retooling, and resending YWAM leaders and missionaries—is well underway. We recently welcomed Benjamin Arnold and his wife, Liz, to help us realize this crucial part of our ministry vision. Benjamin oversees the current construction phase as MBI’s Mission Lodge project manager. He has a civil engineering and construction background in building large infrastructure projects.

Benjamin is originally from Austin, TX, and Liz is from Campbellford, Ontario, Canada. They have served in YWAM for two years. Before moving to Lakeside, they worked in English camps in Thailand, drilled water wells in Mexico, and preached the gospel in Indonesia and New Zealand. They love outdoor activities, from hunting and fishing to hiking, camping, and riding motorcycles.

Sally Jo (SJ) Vander Yacht is from Lynden, WA, and has served 15 years with YWAM. She also has a Master of Arts in the New Testament from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. She says: “Most of my YWAM experience has been serving in the realm of biblical training, including seven years at YWAM Lakeside-Montana with the SBS (School of Biblical Studies) and an additional five years with their Biblical Seminars program.”

Sally Jo loves teaching, training, learning, problem-solving, and helping people understand the hot topics of our current culture and society. She is pioneering and building the Christ-Centered Sexuality (CCS) ministry under MBI’s umbrella. Sally Jo says, “CCS trains and educates Christians in a non-affirming understanding of God’s design and desire for sex, sexuality, gender, and marriage while also helping people learn how to engage in compassion and pastoral care for those who struggle with sexual brokenness.”

Sally Jo also manages MBI’s Instagram account. When she isn’t busy with her MBI and CCS responsibilities, she enjoys boating, traveling, playing Call of Duty, and keeping up with her rambunctious golden retriever, Murphy.

Nate Ballivian works long-distance as part of MBI’s L13 (Leadership 13) team and as MBI’s Volunteer Coordinator. He took his YWAM DTS (Discipleship Training School) in 2006, adding on subsequent YWAM training and leadership schools, a Bachelor of Biblical Studies with Ecclesia College, and life purpose and calling coaching with Coaching Mission International (CMI). He and his family live in Lindale, TX, where they have served with YWAM Tyler since 2009.

Nate loves being exposed to different cultures and foods and enjoys working in facilitation, team building, life coaching, strategic thinking, and leadership development. He says his favorite challenges include “developing something and then passing it on so it’s not dependent on me and helping people and teams get unstuck by bringing clarity.” He also loves being out in nature, reading biographies and historical nonfiction, keeping up with Michigan in college football, and watching Arsenal in the Premier League.

Nate especially enjoys cooking and “eating yummy food” with his wife of 17 years, Lauren, and doing activities with his three kids: Gabe (13), Ephraim (8), and Beatriz (6).

Amy Stevens is a YWAM lifer with 32 years of service and experience. She recently joined MBI to serve as office manager and in L13 resource development.

Originally from Minnesota, Amy lived at and worked on staff with YWAM Lakeside-Montana for 11 years before moving to Taiwan and serving with Taipei Ministries for 21 years. While in Montana, she served as staff for the SBS (School of Biblical Studies) for two years before launching the Titus Project in 1996 and running it for seven years. Amy was the local Titus Project leader and overseer of what became Titus Project Int’l in Taiwan. Additionally, Amy was part of their ministry leadership team, the leadership council, the budget review team, the fiscal team (as an overseer), and the director’s office.

Amy says she gained working knowledge through seminars, experience, and trial and error. She is skilled at teaching, creating resources, systems/SOPs, and information organization. Her favorite challenges include creating spreadsheets, expenditure reports, and systems, especially those related to numbers and accounting.

Amy also says, “I love difficult passages in the Bible, studying and teaching through them. I love to see those without hope and searching for meaning come to believe in Jesus and go on to being discipled, becoming pastors or DTS leaders, etc. And I love the cross-cultural aspect of missions where people from all nations and vastly different cultures come together with the same purpose: to make God known and follow him.”

Amy is married to Michael Stevens from Australia. They have four gifted, mission-oriented adult children: Elise (24), Kenna (21), Anaya (19), and Nathan (18).

The Lord has blessed MBI with a treasure trove of skilled and talented people to help us continue assisting the YWAM missionaries who are making a difference in the world. Thanks for supporting our team with your prayers and encouragement!

Leadership 13: When Expertise Meets Energy

Leadership 13: When Expertise Meets Energy

by | Mar 2, 2020 | Connections Article

MBI’s newest ministry, Leadership 13 (L13) came into existence in 2010 when colleagues Ron Brewster and Dawn Masucci and I felt compelled to combine our years of leadership experience and expertise into a concerted effort to respond to a cry for help from a number of the promising young leaders serving within Youth With a Mission. Those leaders were being called upon to shape this rapidly growing, international, interdenominational movement of Christians called to bring the whole gospel to the whole world.

Though each of us desired to see YWAM succeed at the macro level, with all of its myriad of expressions, we shared an even more pressing passion to see this current generation of leaders adequately equipped to face the challenges of successfully stewarding their respective ministry locations. Having invested 30-plus years of service at the senior leadership level in one location, it was and is our firm conviction that any lasting leadership legacy can only be accomplished when those “to whom much has been given” graciously acknowledge and respond to the second half of this biblical mandate that “much is required.”

L13 was forged in the fire of finding ways to pass on our life lessons and expertise in any way God might want to use them for the benefit of YWAM leaders. The end goal was to see the advancement of the kingdom of God globally.

Since embracing that call 9 years ago, it has been our privilege to have assisted in training and coaching leaders in approximately 16 YWAM operating locations from the U.S. and Canada to far flung regions such as Cambodia, Taiwan, Costa Rica, and Barbados. Though some of the leaders we have had the privilege of serving are mature and experienced, the much larger percentage have been young, inexperienced , and, in some locations, first generation Christians.

These God-called, amazing servants find themselves responsible for some of the most innovative ministry expressions we have ever seen, ranging from the foundational YWAM Discipleship Training School (DTS) to numerous other secondary expressions such as the School of Biblical Studies (SBS) and School of Community Development, just to name a couple. Because 2 of the 18 foundational values of YWAM are about being “visionary” and doing “new things in new ways,” there is no end to the creative ventures we have observed as these ministries explore how they can more effectively take the age-old gospel message and contextualize it to reach the cultures to which God has called them.

The gospel is going forward to some of the least-reached areas of the world through creative approaches that include everything from very sophisticated English/computer education programs to AIDS orphan homes to micro business enterprise (designed not only to provide income streams for the local ministry but do so in a way that serves to generate financial support for full-time, indigenous workers). The challenge is that, in many cases, their remarkable effectiveness has become a double-edged sword. The accelerated growth these ministries are experiencing has outstripped the leaders’ knowledge and expertise as to how to keep the ministry healthy, thriving, and appropriately funded. These are wonderful challenges, but these leaders are often ill-equipped to navigate them.

This is exactly the point at which L13 discovered that our year-long approach of coming along side these ministries has borne good fruit. Our expertise joined with their energy and desire to lead well has produced a winning combination. The tools we’re able to give them through our on-site visits as well as Skype coaching and mentoring has proven to be very effective in equipping them with understanding in areas such as organizational dynamics, healthy systems, and strong staff development. Coupled with our core value and commitment toward “developing servant leaders for lasting growth,” L13 not only encourages the leaders we serve but arms them with the confidence necessary to lead those whom God has placed in their charge so that the entire ministry can learn to walk in the footsteps of our great servant leader and master, Jesus Christ.

Since its inception, L13 has been blessed beyond measure to add four more players to the team, Jason Howard, Lane Lackey, Veronica VanSchuylenburg and occasionally John Briggs. Each brings with them a skill set that has broadened L13’s ability to help in even more areas.

Just over a year ago, L13 was delighted and blessed to be invited to make Mission Builders International its permanent home. When the opportunity first presented itself, it almost seemed like a no-brainer. The call of MBI, “So Others May Thrive,” seemed like a hand-in-glove fit with all that L13 desired to accomplish.

Even though it seemed obvious, however, the final decision to join forces was only made after a great deal of prayer by all of those involved as well as a serious discussion with the wise and godly board of directors that serves MBI. At the end of the process, all were in hearty agreement that to add L13 to the MBI family was a match made in heaven. MBI’s call to the larger Mission as opposed to any one location is a call that we share together.

As the times we live in become increasingly uncertain, we invite you to join your prayers with ours that MBI and L13 will find ever-widening circles of influence where our passion, “So Others May Thrive,” can be expressed in and through our Mission and ultimately to the ends of the earth.

~Gordy McDonald