Young Alumni of the Year: Adam & Rachel

The recipients of OKWU’s 2018 Young Alumnus of the Year awards are Rachel and Adam Nash (’08). This award is given to alums under the age of 40 who serve the Church, community, and Oklahoma Wesleyan University above and beyond the call.

Adam and Rachel more than exemplify these criteria. After graduating from OKWU in 2008, Adam spent a year with Global Partners in Cambodia teaching English and running soccer camps. After that year and then their wedding in 2010, the couple returned to OKWU where Adam joined the graduate assistant MBA program as an assistant coach with the OKWU women’s soccer team. Once he completed the program in 2012, Adam joined a mission team to South Sudan in early 2013. That experience led Rachel and Adam to accept positions with Make Way Partners—an organization fighting human trafficking in Sudan and South Sudan. Adam provides financial and administrative expertise for Make Way as well as videography, while Rachel employs her creativity in leading the organization’s child sponsorship program. In the midst of their active ministry, the couple also has started their own family: Eli (4) and Emry (2).

Both products of Wesleyan churches, Adam as the son of a Wesleyan pastor and Miltonvale alumni, and Rachel through her youth pastor, alumnus Isaiah Veale, the couple credit their time at OKWU as part of the foundation upon which they have built their rewarding and, at times, heartbreaking ministry. Representing one of the only remaining organizations to provide humanitarian aid [in Sudan and South Sudan], they have documented acts of genocide and government-controlled ethnic cleansing of the Nuban people to a world largely unaware of their suffering.

“I definitely appreciated the clarity of OKWU’s mission,” said Adam. “When one starts a family, comes face to face with the evils of this world, or deals with heartbreak and loss, [one’s] faith in God is challenged…the foundation of OKWU and the relationships I made there have helped in those difficult times.”

Rachel continued, “[the] Primacy of Christ reminds me that Christ is in complete control…Christ has already won the battle, leaving me free to live in his unconditional love, and in turn, unconditionally love others… The Practice of Wisdom reminds me of the essential meaning behind 1 Corinthians 13. If you dedicate and live your life by the P’s, but have not loved, it is all meaningless. Wisdom is transforming Truth into acts of love.”

Adam and Rachel have truly embodied the mission of OKWU, and continue to take what they have learned to “restore a broken and hurting world.”