Ashley Kim

1. I will miss living in a community with my incredible Christian friends, with the freedom to pursue all sorts of projects and ideas alongside them on this amazing campus in an amazing city!!

2. I am most thankful to have learned the hope I have in Christ! That the True, Good, and Beautiful are perfectly intertwined, and my life has glorious purpose because I get to be a part of God’s ultimate story of reality! Like, wow! 

3. I became a Christian my freshman year, and since then I have learned what it means to love God with my heart as well as my mind. I think this was made possible by realizing more about what it means for Him to have loved us first. I was quite the reluctant convert and thought obeying him would be a chore, but now I see that He ordains all things for our good, and getting to enjoy and love Him without fear of condemnation is the greatest gift I could receive! My life has been filled with a newfound joy, peace, and purpose!

4. I am spending next year in Heidelberg, Germany through the Fulbright Award doing research in computational neuroscience/genomics! I’m so excited to be in a city so significant to the Reformation and am hoping to spend a lot of time in reflection and independent study, especially in philosophy, theology, and math. After that I hope to pursue further research and study in a field related to neuroscience and philosophy, Lord willing! 

5. I love the people, the worship, and the Gospel-centered teaching that is both so reverent and so personal. Christ Church has forever changed my conception about what a church can be, and it feels like I’ve gotten a glimpse of what the early Church in Acts might have been like! And among many other things, I will miss the babies in nursery, Dalila’s fabulous hospitality, and walking through Central Park with the pals on Sundays 🙂

Susie Cray

1. I think the thing I will miss most about being a student at Columbia is the friends I have made here.

2. I am very thankful to have learned more about what it is like to be a Christian in a quite un-Christian context.

3. I think witnessing how, for certain of my friends, their faith saturates every part of their lives has challenged me and helped me to grow in this too.

4. I plan to attend law school next year.

5. I will miss the people, the music, and pastor Keith’s preaching.

Thanks so much for helping make CCNYC such a welcoming place for all of us students! I love going here!

Feven Naba

1. I will greatly miss the Christian community God provided during my time at Columbia. Additionally, the research lab where I have spent countless hours has been a significant part of my academic journey. 

2. “To desire the aid of grace is the beginning of grace!”  

3. God has been incredibly faithful, gentle, and patient with me as I navigated the early stages of my undergraduate years. I have witnessed God, in His mercy, bring together the broken pieces of my life into a unified whole. I have grown from living in fear to fully embracing the fatherly love of God. I struggled with the guilt of failing to present my perfect self to the Lord, but through His mercy, God has taught me what it means to rest in the completed work of Christ and to present myself just as I am, relying on Him to transform and perfect me to His Son’s image.

4. After graduation, I will be moving to California to start my graduate program at Stanford University. I will be doing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on design and fabrication of biomedical devices. 

5. There are many things I will miss about CCNYC, but more specifically, the weekly Bible readings I have with Alice, singing hymns on Sunday mornings, and the friendships I’ve formed at CCNYC.

Ben Brake

1. I’ll miss the intellectual and friendly environment, where I’ve been able to discuss all sorts of important issues with friends, whether theoretical or practical.

2. I’m grateful to have been exposed to alternate frameworks of life, both within and outside Christianity, which were presented in intellectually robust ways. Ultimately, this caused me to better hone my own views and to appreciate the importance of humility in one’s own convictions and nuance in dialogue.

3. Regularly living with Christian friends who share a desire for rigorous, heartfelt faith has certainly opened my eyes to the importance of community in the Christian walk. While faith is grounded in the individual’s direct, unmediated relationship to God, it nonetheless has clear implications for social living. The past four years, I have come to better appreciate the role of the local church in one’s life, of sharing prayers with others, and of ‘running the race’ alongside others.

4. TBD

5. The small church membership was very new to me and provided a closer sense of community than I had been accustomed to, growing up at a larger church. It has also been very important to me that Christ Church has provided Christian community that extends beyond typical university life, including people of all ages.