Seek is a new cohort discipleship program from Mennonite Central Committee that had it’s first pilot earlier this year in Israel/Palestine. The second pilot is planned for next year in Cambodia. It is a 6 month discipleship program meant to engage Anabaptist youth (ages 18-20) with the core tenants of Anabaptist faith, MCC, and the global church.

Seek to grow in love. Seek to live and serve like Jesus.
The Seek program will help you discover the beauty and brokenness of the world while living in community and ministering to others. This six-month discipleship program will help you learn more deeply what it means to be an Anabaptist follower of Jesus.

mcc.org/seek

Historically, MCC engaged High School graduates with PAX and SALT, providing transformative cross-cultural service experiences, and there’s an acknowledgement that MCC has been missing this demographic as SALT has shifted to largely being a post University experience for most participants.

Seek has the additional goal of engaging Anabaptist youth who currently have limited MCC involvement (low to no recent participation in SALT/YAMEN/IVEP). This will hopefully include participants from Anabaptist communities in Europe, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and elsewhere as well as North America.

Cambodia is a very different context from Israel/Palestine and we have context specific themes to focus on during the Seek pilot here.

• Jesus and the Bodhi Tree: What it is like to belong to a Christian Minority in a Buddhist context?
• The Church and the Killing Fields. How did the Christian church provide healing and hope in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge?
• The Church Resurrected. The Cambodian Church is – aside from a few house churches that met in secret while Christianity was illegal – only 33 years old. What does that mean for the local leadership and how the church relates to society?
• Seeds Choked by Thorns. How have international missions helped and harmed the local Cambodian church?

Seek differs from SALT/YAMEN in that it’s a 6 month cohort program (not 11 months), they’re living together with Cambodian Christian youth in a dormitory (not on their own in host families), and they’re not placed separately at different partners. Instead, they’ll be following an Anabaptist discipleship curriculum while engaging in various planned activities (eg cultural immersion, service, joining partner/church activities, attending a variety of local churches, listening to testimonies of people here, etc).

The Seek cohort in Cambodia will run from January to June 2024. There’s an article with more details up on MCC.org at https://mcc.org/our-stories/mcc-seek-program-helps-young-adults-explore-faith-and-culture