Serving And Being Served

By Carter Keefe 

In a Discipleship Training School (DTS), students spend three months in classroom learning followed by three months on outreach. For Jayden Mulder and his wife Allisa, that outreach led them — and the four students they were leading — to Papua New Guinea.

Outreach in a place like PNG means wearing many hats. “We helped wherever help was needed,” Jayden shared. In the first half of their trip, their primary focus was on community engagement — building relationships and to help bring hope to the villages they visited.

“We played a lot of soccer,” Jayden laughed. “A couple of us gathered all the kids, and we played all day.” One moment that stood out to him was when he noticed a small group of teens sitting off to the side. “We sat with them and talked. They were just so excited to have us there in their village.”

These villages had been going through a difficult season, with recent tribal warfare causing injuries and unrest. “You could feel the heaviness, the dark spiritual atmosphere,” Jayden recalled. “Being able to talk to those boys, speak life over them, and bring encouragement — that was super powerful.”

The next day, the team shifted gears to assist with a vision ministry, distributing glasses to help people see clearly again — many for the first time in years. “We saw people bringing out their old YWAM medical sheets from 2017 and 2018,” Jayden said. “It was amazing to see the long-term impact YWAM has had.”

Between helping with glasses, the team returned to community engagement. “We’d sing songs, teach dances — for hours sometimes — just to draw people in so we could share the Gospel,” Jayden said.

After the team had finished their songs and were simply hanging out, a family approached them. “They told us they had prepared a song and dance performance for us, the volunteers,” Jayden recalled. “It was beautiful — like a full-on show. It turned into a party with singing, and laughter.” That moment, he said, captured something deeper: the team had come to serve, but they were also being served — a powerful picture of God’s love in action.

Hospitality was a theme throughout their time in PNG. Jayden shared how, on nights when the team had to stay overnight in villages, they usually slept under houses — often waking up in puddles after rainstorms. But one night, a woman cleared her entire floor just so the team could sleep inside. “It’s those little things,” Jayden said. “We were still on the floor, but to see her generosity, even in her own challenging situation — it was really impactful.”

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More Than Just Service

Mission work is more than what we do — it’s how we love. It’s easy to focus on tasks or services offered, but without intentional love, presence, and time, those efforts can feel empty. Jayden and his team modeled something deeper: loving people not just through action, but through presence.

Their trip to Papua New Guinea wasn’t just about what they gave. It was also about what they received — stories, smiles, hospitality, and the shared joy of community. In those exchanges, the Kingdom of God was beautifully displayed.