Zack Babb

A couple of years ago, I accepted a call to serve as a student missionary in Chile. That experience taught me things about myself I’d never realized before. For example, eating things late at night makes me feel bad when I wake up in the morning! I learned other, deeper things, too. I’m passionate about helping people, especially when it comes to their relationships with God. I want to be sure people understand the reasons for their faith. We all need a solid picture of what faith is all about, and I want us all to come to the place where we are willing to give Christ everything, no matter what that means.

I’m originally from Illinois. My parents wanted me to go to an Adventist school but I wanted to be an engineer, and I lived next to the University of Illinois, which has a very good engineering school. I was planning on going there but things changed when God called me to be a pastor.

Six years ago I would’ve laughed at the idea that I would ever say I wanted to be a pastor. When God called me to ministry I eventually said yes, and then I decided to come to Andrews University.

A couple of years ago, I accepted a call to serve as a student missionary in Chile. That experience taught me things about myself I’d never realized before. For example, eating things late at night makes me feel bad when I wake up in the morning! I learned other, deeper things, too.

I’m so glad I had that year in Chile. It not only introduced me to myself, but sparked some new passions and projects. One of those projects started because I wanted to share one of my favorite Ellen White quotes with a friend in Spanish. When I looked it up I couldn’t find it in Spanish, either online or in the app. I began to wonder how many other fantastic Ellen White quotes non-English speakers were missing out on, and I asked myself what role I could play in changing that situation. Duolingo inspired me.

Duolingo is a language-learning program that originally used social networking to provide translation of documents. Companies would sell their copy to Duolingo, users translated the text into another language, and Duolingo compiled all the translations into the best version, which was then passed back to the original company. I want to do the same thing with Ellen White documents.

We have representatives from many different countries here at Andrews, so finding translators shouldn’t be too hard. I’d also like to find a programmer that would be interested in designing the program and interfacing it with the Ellen White Estate here. Hopefully, Lord willing, this will happen.

I’m passionate about helping people, especially when it comes to their relationships with God. I want to be sure people understand the reasons for their faith. We all need a solid picture of what faith is all about, and I want us all to come to the place where we are willing to give Christ everything, no matter what that means.

I want everyone to have a genuine experience with God, and I hope to contribute to that experience through things like the translation project, my calling to ministry and my passion for helping. Seeing what God has in store for the rest of my life is going to be an adventure.