Alumni Spotlight

Linda Smith and her husband, Frank, have been together since they were 15 and have ave known Kennon Vaughan, founder of Downline Ministries, since he was a young 15 year old himself. Her first memory of KV is of him—with BB gun in hand—shooting his fellow campers in the stomach at a summer church camp where she was serving as the nurse. Twenty years later he came to her to talk about the vision for Downline Ministries. When he first came to them excited about the possibility of... Read More

  Remi Onayemi started out a little skeptical of this whole biblical discipleship thing. While she thought it was a good idea, it seemed so new and so uncommon that surely it could not be a mandate of Christ. The Lord, however, used Downline and other experiences, including a trip to Nigeria, to quickly change that view. Remi grew up in Chicago and came to know the Lord when she was young. She really began to grow in her relationship with God during college at Trinity... Read More

For this month’s Alumni Spotlight, we wanted to do somethingslightly different. We want to introduce you to Downline’s first EmergingLeader to commit to a one-year STINT in another country, Ryan Brazile. Ryan is twenty-four years old and hails from Bentonville,Arkansas. He attended to Vanderbilt University, where he met Jamie Trussell,Downline’s Emerging Leader Director. Even though the two lived in differentparts of the country for Ryan’s four years of college, they continued a sort... Read More

  “I was a poster-child for a Pharisee…I didn’t even think I needed to go to Church.” Looking back, this is how Katie Hobson describes the majority of her life. She grew up thinking she was a Christian until college, when God used discipleship to change her life. A young woman on Campus Outreach staff discipled her, teaching and showing her the truth of the Gospel. Katie has seen first-hand how discipleship changed her life and she now desires to use Christ’s model in younger... Read More

    When Nancy Holcomb decided to participate in the DownLine Institute in 2008, she was no stranger to disciple-making. In fact, she had been a part of a disciple-making relationship with her mother her entire life. Born and reared in Memphis, Nancy said of her parents, “They loved the Lord in a contagious way.” Her mother led her in a profession of faith when she was four years old, and when she was in the eighth grade, her father took her to live in Kenya for a year, which... Read More