Ben Wyant, Lyssa Henry

When prompted with the task of finding someone cool at Southern Wesleyan University to talk about, the choice was clear. The decision was easy. “You know who’s a cool guy? Gavin Potter.” Gavin’s life and faith have already made a massive impact on college students and gap-year students from all around the country. His insight on college life and experience in places around the world sets him apart as someone who has already lived a full life before turning 30, which is not something that can be said for most people.

Before creating the domino effect of everything he did as a staff member at SWU, Gavin was a student here himself. Being from Central already, it would’ve been very easy to find reasons not to go to SWU: he might want to get away from home, he might want to experience a new place, or he might have had a bad experience with the school growing up around it. This was not the case with Gavin, though. His parents went to SWU, as well as many of the youth pastors he grew up respecting. He also had the benefit of many college students from SWU investing in him in a way that made him eager to be part of a campus that already felt like home. SWU meant something special and gave him hope that he could be for others what people were for him. During his time at SWU, Gavin became a leader of student activities and helped embody and strengthen SWU school spirit.

After studying for several years at SWU as a double major in Youth and Christian Ministry, Gavin was connected to OneLife through a mentor, Chris Armfield, who is a pastor at the church Gavin attends in Greenville called CityLights. Chris asked Gavin, who was focusing his education on college ministry, to travel to Lancaster, PA with him to speak at OneLife. OneLife, a Christian gap-year discipleship program based at Lancaster Bible College, is targeted for students out of high school looking to take a year of learning about themselves, God, and their place in the world while maintaining academic accreditation and not missing out on college experience. The program often brings in outside speakers for new and challenging perspectives, and one day after speaking to students Gavin sat down with Chris for coffee. Chris told him that he actually brought Gavin with him to see if he would be a good fit to hire on as staff at CityLights and continued to offer him a job.

Around the same time, Gavin was offered a job at OneLife, and Chris encouraged him to take that job because it would be best for him. As Gavin sat down with Peter Sullivan, the founder of OneLife, they began to entertain the idea of expanding OneLife to more locations outside of Lancaster Bible College. Gavin and Chris both persuaded Peter that SWU would potentially be a good fit for OneLife, and Gavin’s connection with Dr. Voss was enough for Peter to give Gavin the green light to meet with the SWU president. At the start of their meeting, Dr. Voss was very hesitant; he began by saying, “In preparation for this time, I did some research on students who take a gap year and found that 70% of students who take a gap year don’t go on to finish a 4-year degree, and most of those students end up regretting it.” Gavin was able to convince Dr. Voss it was worth a shot with the year of college credits OneLife students earn through the program, and Gavin began recruiting and eventually moving back to Central to work with OneLife at SWU.

With such a dynamic background, there is no surprise in hearing that Gavin has done a lot of travelling. From places around the United States to places such as Israel and the Dominican Republic, travelling has become an awesome and rewarding part of his job and his life. Gavin’s favorite place to have travelled to, however, was unexpected. Of all the exotic and interesting places he’s travelled, Colorado has been his favorite. Gavin loves the memories he has made there, the diversity of the land, and especially places in Colorado like Denver. He did a program there with a group called Forge that gives college students the opportunity to learn with them through a program called The Experience. This experience for him was huge in supporting his calling to help people in their own personal relationships with Christ. Considering all of that, it is not hard to see why Colorado would be his favorite place.

Speaking of Gavin’s calling, there is nothing that could explain it better than his own words, “I exist to invite, develop, and equip people to live abundantly from the overflow of their own intimacy with Christ. That’s my outward mission. My inward mission is simply to be intimate with God.” These two missions are a clear and accurate summary of how Gavin portrays himself. Even without meeting Gavin in person, it is easy to see through his actions and the way he interacts with people that he really cares about them. He does so much for other people one could even say that he was capable of overdoing the service, but he doesn’t. Gavin helps people without wearing himself to the bone, which is an impressive feat in itself. The cool thing about his two missions is that living out one, his inward mission, reflects on how well he can live out the other. The way that Gavin lives with God is the way he can help other people to figure out how to do it, too. It seems impossible to live a life so boldly in a selfless way, but Gavin truly seems to be doing what he is doing for the sake of others. He says,

I love people. I love seeing it “click” with people. My favorite thing I love seeing “click” is this message: that the gospel has freed us from making much of ourselves into making much of Him. It’s so liberating to be able to take our eyes off ourselves and to turn them towards the freedom of the gospel. That’s why I love what I do.

An important factor in Gavin’s ability to live his mission out daily is his feelings towards what God has called him to do. The position he is in as Assistant Site Director of OneLife at SWU gives him opportunity after opportunity to interact and love on college students and teach them the good news he feels convicted and called to teach. Getting up and going to work is something he can be excited about as he knows what he’s doing is having an impact on the world through individual lives. Gavin is, of course, a human being, so he also gets excited whenever he gets the chance to breathe and be with his friends away from work and school.

If Gavin is so good at not burning himself out with what he does, what is it that pulls him back to earth and allows him to relax? One thing that he does that a lot of people could learn from is setting a time for every day that he stops working. A big problem that a lot of people have is that they bring their work into every part of their lives, never taking a break and never stopping, to the point that it consumes them and makes them essentially useless in many other aspects of life, but putting an intentional stopping point in his day helps Gavin a lot to avoid his work taking over. He loves what he does, but even the best jobs can be stressful. He’ll make a checklist for the day and finish it as soon as he possibly can, so he can see everything that is coming and can anticipate the time he gets to spend relaxing, which can make any tough day easier. What does a dynamic guy do to relax, though? When he has the time, some things that cool down a hard day for him are reading, playing the saxophone (which is awesome!), watching baseball, hanging out with friends when he doesn’t facilitate the time himself, and watching really good movies, which can make better any day.

Gavin Potter may be one of the most interesting people at Southern Wesleyan University, particularly of his age. Gavin, through the lives of all of the college students he has served, has touched the lives of more people than he knows. He clearly is not finished with his mission as he continues to teach and shepherd students in the OneLife program and around campus today.