After Grad Opportunities

Cedarville seniors prepare to take the gospel to the world

By Megan Deets

When Cedarville University seniors anticipate graduation, one thing that they are most excited about is seeing how God will carry out the Great Commission through their lives after college.

Leah Hilton, a senior Linguistics major, has desired to be a missionary since she heard the story of David Livingstone at six years old. She began her freshman year as a Nursing major because health care is often needed in missions. However, she soon switched to linguistics, allowing her to take more Bible classes while still studying a field applicable to cross-cultural missions, with its focus on different cultures and languages. 

In addition to her classes at Cedarville, Hilton gained practical experience on the mission field through short-term mission trips. Two week-long trips to Mexico taught her how to serve a community and support established missionaries within that community. 

Her trip to South Asia, in the summer of 2025, revealed the challenges of being thrown into a new missions culture and showed her the incredible faithfulness of local churches amidst persecution.

“An interesting thing about being overseas is that your sin kind of magnifies itself because you’re placed in a different situation where you see things differently, and you see yourself differently,” Hilton said.

Hilton is not going to the mission field immediately because she has observed that missionaries often quit because of a lack of accountability.

“The biggest challenge of being a missionary is that you’re going to a place that doesn’t have an established church, or it doesn’t have a healthy established church,” Hilton said. “It would be easy to become discouraged and fainthearted because you don’t have that same community that you
did before.” 

After she graduates, Hilton plans to live in the Dayton area for a few years and work as a secretary or teach at a private school. She is also part of the Old North Dayton church plant being sent out by Centerville Christian Fellowship this spring. 

Hilton wants to be poured into by the church that sends her overseas before she goes out to the field. 

“I want to do missions long-term, but I want to be known by my church and sent well,” Hilton said. 

Hilton also plans to church plant on the mission field.

“We see how every place that Paul went, he planted a church,” Hilton said. “It’s not just a quick, ‘Let’s share the gospel and then go to the next place.’”

Andrew Shives, a Master of Divinity (mDiv) student at Cedarville has also been well-prepared to go
into ministry.

After graduation, he will begin a job as the Pastor of Student and Family Ministries at Paramount Baptist Church in his hometown of Hagerstown, Maryland.

Ministry has been on Shives’ mind since his senior year of high school. Both the pastor and the youth pastor of his church told Shives that they believed God had gifted him for ministry.

Shives has interned at his home church for three summers and then interned with Paramount Baptist through a connection from his mDiv. mentorship class. 

“I think one of the unique challenges and blessings with youth ministry is being able to have interactive study with the students,” Shives said. 

Shives envisions two specific ways that the current culture of youth ministry can be improved. 

He desires for the entire family to be a part of the process of student growth. He doesn’t want youth ministry to replace the students’ parents, but he wants it to come alongside them.

Shives also wants to help youth build a strong foundation for their faith. He has witnessed several friends drift away from Christ as they entered their college years, and he wants to equip students to be ready to answer hard questions that his friends may not have been able to. 

“I feel like one of the biggest things I’ve had to learn is to be able to know God’s Word,” Shives said. “Not just to teach it, but to be able to answer questions about it, to think about how it applies
to them.”

Like Shives, Emma Jones,* a senior Environmental Science major, wants to reach people with the gospel. She plans to work in cross-cultural missions through agriculture.

In many countries, agriculture is essential to survival, but people don’t always know the best way to take care of the land. Food production is lacking, causing malnutrition in many people. In the modern United States, much of farming has lost its focus on God’s dependence due to the larger scale of agriculture. Across the world, however, people can lose their entire livelihood because of the weather.

“You never really know the weight of a prayer for rain until you’re a farmer,”
Jones said. 

By teaching people about sustainable farming methods, Jones’ goal is to show them to worship the creator rather than the creation and to
give them time to focus
on the gospel.

“[Agriculture] gives empowerment and independence to build the church,” Jones said. 

Jones appreciates the personal training she has received from Cedarville faculty, and especially
Dr. Mark Gathany, a
biology professor.

“Learning underneath him of different ways we can participate in creation care, different ways that we can use creation care for ministry has been one of the biggest factors [in my education],” Jones said. 

Jones’ internships have also prepared her for both agricultural and missions work. A few summers ago, she received an opportunity to work in watershed management in northern Indiana. This job taught her how to build relationships between different groups of people as she worked with the government and the farmers. 

As Jones readies herself to face the challenges of the mission field, she knows that she must trust God to provide for her. 

“When we decide that it’s difficult instead of deciding that God’s made a path for it, we make it more difficult,” Jones said. 

These seniors’ time at Cedarville has equipped them to face whatever they encounter next. They walk forward, trusting the Lord with the plans that he has for their lives. 

*This student’s name was changed due to safety in her future missions work.

Megan Deets is a freshman Professional Writing and Information Design student. Some of the things that she loves are new notebooks, fresh fruit and musicals.