About the CGYA
The Christian Gap Year Association (CGYA) helps Christian young adults discover their purpose and path, develop essential life skills, and deploy into the next steps of life with confidence and a strong biblical worldview.
Mission
The Christian Gap Year Association is a community of faith-based organizations committed to helping Christian young adults discover their purpose and path, develop essential life skills, and deploy into the next steps of life with confidence and a strong biblical worldview.
Vision
We envision a future where Christian gap year programs are widely accessible across a variety of dynamic ministry environments — Christian camps, mission organizations, churches, and even faith-driven marketplace organizations (businesses) — and recognized as vital and powerful pathways to launching the God-designed plan for Christian young adults.
We want to see more students build essential tools for proactively processing life from a biblical worldview, with strong tools and intentionality—before accruing college debt, starting their careers, and/or pursuing other life paths—in order to effectively steward the unique purpose God designed them for. Research shows that taking an intentional gap year increases college graduation rates, improves college GPAs, increases participation in campus activities, and increases career satisfaction.
Purpose
The Christian Gap Year Association is a nonprofit organization working to coordinate and expand faith-based gap year program visibility, development, and collaboration, while helping Christian young adults discover opportunities optimized to invest in their unique journey.
Every Christian young adult is unique. And every Christian gap year program is unique. At the same time, each has common purpose, convictions, needs, and opportunities.
The program standards set forth by the CGYA were designed by ministry leaders with decades of youth ministry, camp ministry, missions, and higher education experience, with an unwavering focus on stewarding the God-designed trajectory of each enrollee. The result is a framework that creates common alignment on the essential outcomes of a Christian gap year program, while celebrating and amplifying the diversity and uniqueness of each program and each individual.