I met Maria at a brick kiln in Punjab. She was thirteen years old.

Whole families work in those kilns. Parents and children together, most of them bound by debt they will never finish paying. The children carry what they can carry. That is the arrangement, and it does not change.

I asked her a simple question: how do you live here?

She said, "As a girl, I have no choice. I work with my family."

Then she told me she wanted to study. And then she said something I was not prepared for. She said her deeper desire was to know God.

A thirteen-year-old girl in a brick kiln, with no school and no options in front of her, told me the thing she wanted most was God.

I have not been able to put that sentence down since. Everything I am doing now — the study, the training, the plans I am still making — I am doing because of Maria, and because of the thousands of children like her.

My name is Adnan George. I am from Lahore, Pakistan, and I am asking for help to get to Brazil in March 2027.

Being the only one

Pakistan is about 96% Muslim and 1.6% Christian. Christians are a small minority and often an overlooked one. I grew up in a Christian family, but our faith was Christian in name more than in practice. We had the label. We did not have much else.

In school, I was the only Christian in my class. My classmates would not sit next to me or eat with me. Some of them invited me to accept Islam, kindly at first and later not kindly at all. I was kept out of the school sports programme because of my faith. I was assaulted once for refusing to convert. I changed schools more than once, hoping the next place would be easier. It never was.

So I hid. I did not tell people I was a Christian unless they found out.

And I asked myself a question I am not proud of: is it really worth holding on to a faith that costs this much?

The empty center

Here is the part I most want you to understand, because it explains everything that came after.

In Pakistan, every student must study Islamic theology, whatever their own religion. So year after year I studied Islam — formally, carefully, in detail. And nobody ever taught me Christianity. Not at school. Not really at home.

By the time I finished school, I knew far more about Islam than about my own faith. And I began to think Islam might simply be true. Not because anyone had persuaded me. Because I had nothing to weigh it against.

I was not resisting Jesus. I had never met him.

If there is someone in your life who seems closed to Christ, I want you to consider that they may not be closed at all. They may just be empty, the way I was empty.

An assignment

In 2017, a need-based scholarship took me to Forman Christian College in Lahore. My family was unstable, and money was short, and it was the only reason I could keep studying at all. At Forman I met Christians who actually believed something.

In 2019, I met a Korean missionary named Dr. Shinho Chung, who taught environmental sciences there. He offered to support my education until I graduated. There was one condition. He gave me an assignment.

He handed me a photocopied Gospel of John and asked me to check it against the Urdu Bible, line by line, and mark every typing error I could find.

Let me be honest about my heart in that moment. I thought: I need this money. Fine. I will read the Bible if that is what it takes.

So I sat down with two texts side by side and began comparing them, word by word, hunting for mistakes.

What I did not know was that Dr. Chung had put those errors in himself. Deliberately. Because he understood that the only way to make me read every single word of the Gospel of John was to make me look for something else.

That is how I met Jesus. Proofreading.

Somewhere in that assignment I stopped hunting for mistakes and started listening. I met a Person. And one verse caught me and would not let go: "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me."

I asked my questions out loud. One of them was this: do we Christians believe in three Gods? Nobody had ever explained the Trinity to me, not once in my whole life. Dr. Chung sat with that question until Scripture answered it, and for the first time I understood who the God of my own family actually was.

The calling I did not want

I planned to become an entrepreneur. A businessman who could support poor students. It was a good plan, and I loved it.

My first response to the call was not obedience. It was: how can I serve? I am not good enough. I am not strong. I am not holy. I was the boy who had hidden his Christian identity out of fear, living on somebody else's money.

Through prayer and through friends who kept encouraging me when I wanted to quit, I slowly stopped arguing.

Youth of Christ

In 2020, with four friends, I founded Youth of Christ.

We serve children and families in marginalized rural communities through education and relief work. We come with school bags and notebooks. We come with food. We come after the floods. Since 2020, we have served more than a thousand students.

We started with four. Today there are more than twenty core team members, all serving voluntarily, and more than fifty volunteers working in different cities through their own local churches.

This work carries real cost in our context, and I will not describe it in more detail than that on a public page. The people doing it are in Pakistan. I am not.

What it costs to come to Korea

Serving in those rural areas showed me a second problem. Many pastors there preach without any theological training. They preach from feeling, sincerely but not always faithfully. And I realised I could not repair in others what was broken in me. I could not equip anyone while I myself was unequipped.

So I applied to ACTS University in South Korea to study theology.

When I told my father I had been accepted, he said this: If you continue studying theology, you are free from our family. Do whatever you want.

He was not being cruel. He was frightened. Theology meant ministry, ministry meant danger, and he believed I was putting the whole family at risk. He wanted me safe. He wanted me in his paint shop.

I went anyway.

For a year and a half, I had no contact with my family. No phone calls. No help. Nothing. All I could do in those months was pray. Slowly, my father began to accept it. He had seen that the passion was real.

We are still rebuilding. That relationship is not fully healed. I am telling you that on purpose, because I do not want to hand you a story with the hard part edited out.

Korea

I arrived in Korea in the spring of 2024, and I will graduate with my Master of Divinity in February 2027.

The hardest part has been the language. There is a version of you, the funny one, the warm one, the one who knows what to say, who does not exist yet in a language you are still learning.

I serve as an evangelist at Anseong Faith Church. On Saturdays I teach Bible stories to children. On Sundays I preach and lead Bible study in the English ministry. And I teach our congregation about Islam and how to reach Muslim people, because I come from a Muslim-majority country and the Muslim population in South Korea is growing.

Think about that for a moment. The compulsory Islamic studies. The years of learning a faith that was not mine while nobody taught me my own. The thing that emptied me as a boy is now the thing my church needs from me on a Sunday morning.

I also still lead Youth of Christ from here — two video meetings a week, phone calls in between, connecting the team and running discipleship training with the people on the ground in Pakistan.

Why Brazil

I have been selected as a participant in the Lausanne Movement's Fourth Younger Leaders Gathering, held 16 to 22 March 2027 in Águas de Lindóia, Brazil, in partnership with the Brazilian Association of Cross-Cultural Missions.

What I am asking God for is a Youth Dream Centre in Pakistan. Not just a school. A place where young people know they belong, and where they are equipped academically, spiritually, and in missional leadership, so that they become the next generation of missionaries to their own people. And beyond that, a church that looks like the church in Acts 2:42–47.

I am going to Brazil to sit with leaders from every region of the world who are building things like this, and to come back with what I learn.

I am also staying one additional week to visit Brazilian churches, hosted by a friend in São Paulo. Brazil sends more cross-cultural missionaries than almost any country in the Global South, and I want to understand how a church in a poor country became a sending church. That question sits underneath everything I am trying to build in Pakistan.

What I am raising

Lausanne covers my accommodation, meals, and airport transport for the seven days of the gathering. Everything else is mine.

Nothing has been raised yet. You would be first.

Three things I am asking

1. Give, if you are able, at any amount.
2. Share this page. I do not have a large network, and this only reaches people if someone passes it on.
3. And pray — for the children of Pakistan, for Maria and the thousands like her, for the young leaders God is raising there, and for my family, that what is still broken between us would be fully healed.

Philippians 1:21 has become my life verse. "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

Thank you for reading this far.