Our Vision - Overview
The Life Center Project is committed to training and equipping young men and women with vocational skills as well as Biblical principles for success in all areas of life (finances; relationships; parenting; etc.), including job placement services, in order to combat the generational dependence on government assistance, as well as positively improve young couples odds for staying together and raising their children in a two-parent household. While we acknowledge this is a big goal – it is one that we are motivated to achieve, and in which we believe we have a well conceived plan that will succeed.

Why a Life Center When the Community Already Has Other Vocational Schools?
Other training centers in the area limit access either to high school students or to high school graduates who can pass an entrance exam. Prospective Life Center students are typically young adults out of high school, often drop outs, who need to work toward their GED while learning a vocational skill. They have missed the high school age group opportunities and are unable to pass entrance exams to other more traditional vocational programs. Through Work One programs and other scholarship programs Life Center is able to welcome students who could not get a vocational education elsewhere in the community. In addition – when you consider the shear number of young adults in our community who would benefit from vocational training, there simply are not enough local options currently available to provide a comprehensive solution. Another aspect that makes the Life Center unique is that we address other areas of life in our training such as finances; relationships; character; ethics; etc. With all of this in mind, it is easy to see that such a training center will do nothing but enhance the number of quality opportunities available to young adults in our community.

Demonstrating Integrated Living
For the last thirty years, the church in America has allowed our culture to dictate to us “acceptable” parameters for practicing and expressing our faith. Our culture has basically said to us, “You can have your religion, but keep it in the church and out of the marketplace.” To truly have a positive impact on society – we need to live INTEGRATED lives where our faith is evident everywhere we go, every minute of the day, not just on Sundays. In other words, we need to live be as a witness and a light everywhere we go – especially outside the four walls of the church. The opposite of “integrated” is “separated”. For too long, we have separated our faith from our everyday lives and the results for society have had tremendously negative consequences. One of the main goals of the Life Center Project is to not only teach students to live integrated lives, but to also provide a place and an outlet for Christians to live and demonstrate integrated lives as a living testimony before the student population and community.

Remediation
Many of the Life Center students disengaged from formal education years ago having dropped out of school or for other reasons were unable or at the time unwilling to pursue post-secondary education. The average student reads on a fourth grade level. Even those with high school diplomas need to improve their basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills. Because of this, Life Center requires vocational students to participate in basic, remedial math and language courses or participation in an authorized GED program.

Vocational Training Supplemented with Biblical Principles for Success
The Life Center is about more than traditional vocational training. Our goal is to produce young men and women who are not only better equipped to get a good paying job, but who are better prepared to be good parents, better spouses, and integrated members of society who know how to give, not just take. To accomplish this, we provide students with leadership and ethics training based on Biblical principles. Training is supported with visits from people who share their testimonies of real-life examples of how these Biblical principles have positively impacted their lives and made life “work” for them. It is our intention to release a wave of powerful, life-changing testimonies in our classrooms.

• To Business Leaders, we say, “What would your business look like if more of your workers understood the importance of showing up every day, on time, and with a good attitude? What would it be like if they better understood how to handle conflict and the stressful situations that arise in the manufacturing environment?” Any business leader can tell you, skills aren’t the problem with their workforce. Its character and lifestyle issues that they deal with that are the problem. These are the issues that the Life Center is going to deal with head on. That makes us different from other traditional vocational training programs.
• To Community Leaders, we say, “What would your community look like if more of your citizens understood the importance of fellowship and building relationships with those around them? What would it be like if they understood the importance of doing everything in their power to keep their families together – for the sake, and well being of their children – vs. just buying into the lie that relationships are considered ‘throw away’ and not to be valued? What if more of your citizens understood the importance and value, and the blessing inherent in giving something back to the community – whether it be volunteering for clean-up or helping an elderly neighbor with their house work or lawn care? What if more of your citizens better understood the value of building relationships with those of other races and economic status – helping dissolve the prejudice and racism that exists in our society?”
• To Church Leaders, we say, “What would your church look like if more of your parishioners were involved in actively reaching out to the unchurched in the community through programs like the Life Center? What if more new people coming into your congregation understood the principle of “Integrated Living” where they lived out their faith every day of the week, and not just on Sunday? What if more of them were committed to live out a life that exemplifies the best of what a born again Believer can be- a light in the darkness, salt in the earth – a difference maker in the marketplace, and not just in church?” We are going to help educate them on the vast opportunities that lie out there in the harvest field – where the harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers remain few.