Pray for our missionaries…
Our May 2025 “Missionary of the Month” is Aaron and Alana Vasquez with Campus Movement in Springfield, Illinois. The Vasquez family (one of our newest missionaries) evangelizes the lost, establishes & equips young Christians, and exports them into the world to be laborers for a lifetime on the campus of the University of Illinois-Springfield.
MONTHLY MISSION FOCUS
Please share an update on your family.
My wife, Alana Vasquez, and I are both doing well in our health and marriage. We just celebrated our six-year anniversary (3-9-2019), and we absolutely love the work that we do of bringing the gospel to college students. Our two children, Oliver (4) and Thea (18 months) are both healthy and doing well. They love getting to be so involved in what I do on the college campus and getting to be friends with the college students. It's a privilege to have my family so involved in my ministry and for my kids to get to see the gospel change the lives of college students.
Please share an update on your ministry. God has truly blessed the work at the University of Illinois-Springfield (UIS) since we started Campus Movement back in 2021. At the end of year 1, we had about 6-8 students involved in the ministry. Now, as we end year 4, there are around 50 students who are actively involved in the ministry! Over this last school year, we had the privilege to share the gospel with over 125 students, 20 students made professions of faith, and 11 students were baptized and became members of our local church! We try not to get wrapped up in numbers, but we know that numbers represent individual souls, and it brings us great joy to know how many students are being impacted by the gospel through our ministry! We are bringing 25 UIS students with us this summer to our 9-week discipleship program called CAMO Project, with about half of this group being students who have come to Christ within the last year!
How can we be praying for you? Please be praying for us to continually die to ourselves and be willing to do whatever it takes to bring the gospel to college students. We are in need of God's grace every day to be willing to face rejection, opposition, and challenges that come from sharing the gospel on the college campus. Despite challenges and obstacles, God has continually saved college students and matured them in their faith. Please pray with us that more and more students will be saved. Also, please pray for the CAMO Project this summer and the 25 UIS students who are attending. Pray that these students be established in their faith and equipped to labor for Christ for the rest of their lives!
Do you have any special projects or needs outside of your monthly support?
We trust the Lord's provision, but there are two financial needs currently in our life/ministry.
The first is that we will be spending around $4-5,000 in travel expenses during 2025 for ministry. We don't have a reliable vehicle right now to drive to Florida this summer that fits our entire family, so we are buying round-trip plane tickets for our family to attend our ministry's summer discipleship project (CAMO Project) and a rental car while in Florida. We also will be doing a lot of traveling throughout the country over the next year to raise financial support and will have to pay for gas/lodging.
The second is that we just purchased a used min-van for our growing family and the need to travel for ministry. We quickly realized there might be a major transmission issue that could cost a lot of money, but we are unsure what that would be. We are getting it looked into and would definitely appreciate prayers that the problem will not be major.
How can people give to your ministry?
Online is the easiest: https://svctruthextension.churchcenter.com/giving/to/aaron-and-alana-vasquez
If mailing a check: Make the check out to "Southern View Chapel" and write in the memo "Aaron Vasquez". Mail the check to: Southern View Chapel, 4500 S. Second Street, Springfield, IL, 62703
Can you share any interesting facts about you, your family, or your ministry that people may not know? We launched Campus Movement at the University of Illinois-Springfield in August of 2021 and we had zero students involved at the start. In just four years, God has grown our ministry so much that Campus Movement is the largest attended organization on campus! Praise the Lord for saving students and that we are seeing spiritual multiplication take place in real-time on the college campus!