I BELIEVE!
Great is Thy Faithfulness! Mark Papierski
Many of you know me, Mark Papierski, former College Church missionary. Something you may not know about me, however, is that I came to know Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior through the outreach and preaching ministries of College Church. It is a privilege to share my story of God’s grace and how his Word, his people and his faithfulness have transformed my life and the lives of my family over the past 38 years. I grew up in a loving family on the south side of Chicago. We attended a Roman Catholic Church every Sunday but no one in our family had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. My motivation for doing good things was to please my parents, my teachers and God. I was convinced that I was going to heaven based on my good works and had even contemplated becoming a priest. However, I abandoned my Catholic faith when I left for college and was heavily influenced by my secular humanist roommate during my freshman year at the University of Illinois. Fast forward to the fall of 1982. I was 27 years old and was the general manager of the Red Lobster restaurant when it was still located near the Fox Valley Mall. I was also an alcoholic and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. While successful by the world’s definition, my life was a mess. I first started attending College Church and Wheaton College chapel services through the invitation of a Wheaton College coed. She introduced me to her entire floor, and I became the focus of much attention and prayer over the next several months. She also introduced me to three men, who in turn, introduced me to Jesus Christ--Pastor Kent Hughes, C.S. Lewis and her dad. Pastor Hughes had just started preaching through the Book of Romans. I had never been exposed to expository preaching before and became a believer between chapters seven and eight! C.S. Lewis and his book, Mere Christianity, forced me to examine the claims of Christ and answer the question, “Is Jesus Christ a liar, a lunatic or the lord of the universe?” And finally, the college student’s dad asked me two questions that transformed my life:
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1. Have you come to the place in your spiritual life that you know for certain that if you died tonight, you would go to heaven? 2. If you were to die tonight and stand before God, and He asked you, “Why should I let you into heaven,” what would you say? So, confronted with the truth of the gospel through the witness of the Holy Spirit and these three men, I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior on November 12, 1982. My life verse became Ephesians 2:8-10. After being saved by “grace through faith–not as a result of works,” my motivation for doing the “good works that God had prepared for me beforehand” changed from expecting or earning a reward to gratitude for what Christ had already done for me on the cross. My initial call to missions came through my desire to share my newfound faith with my parents. I enrolled in Evangelism Explosion under the mentorship of Pastor Larry Fullerton and had the privilege of leading both of my parents to Christ over the
