What started Ava Ligh on the path to salvation and a job in campus ministry? A middle school crush and a white lie.

Ligh immigrated to the United States from Taiwan when she was 8 years old. Her family was atheistic by default, but throughout middle school and high school, there was a Christian boy she was smitten with. Every year he would invite her to a youth outreach, and every year she went. She had an interest in the boy. God wasn’t on her radar.

At 18, Ligh left her Los Angeles home to attend Columbia University, but the summer after her freshman year she returned home and went to that annual outreach one more time. When her friend asked her what she thought of it, she didn’t want him to think he had wasted his time so she told him it made a lot of sense.

He was so elated at her response that she knew she had made a mistake. While he assumed she had made a spiritual decision, she was still as lost as ever.

Guilty about misleading her friend, Ligh decided that she would try attending a Bible study at Columbia so she could actually check out what Christianity was all about. If she was going to reject it, she wanted to do it with a clear conscience.

After attending for a while, she says she began to think that maybe the Bible wasn’t made up.

“We were in the book of Matthew, and what struck me was that nobody would try to start a religion this way,” she said.

The 12 disciples all seemed like poor leadership candidates if you were going to make up a religion. She describes her journey from that point to a personal relationship with God as “a gradual process of feeling around in the dark.”

Finally, at a retreat, she heard an invitation to receive Christ through an altar call. Standing and walking forward felt weird to Ligh, so she stayed in her seat. With a heavy dose of skepticism she prayed, “If you really are real, Jesus, you can come into my heart.”

Immediately she began to question whether she had been brainwashed or become part of a cult, but a friend helped her through her season of doubt. Looking back, she’s grateful that during those years she was able to attend Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City and sit under the teaching of Tim Keller.

“I was always taught in a way that was speaking to me,” Ligh said. “[Keller] was so contextualized in New York City with the intellectual crowd.”

After graduating from Columbia in 1999, Ligh worked in consulting for a while. Then she got her master’s degree in education and worked in public schools until she had children and decided to become a homemaker. 

When her youngest went to kindergarten, Ligh became restless. She thought about renewing her teaching certificate, but then a friend shared that her husband was starting a campus ministry at Columbia and was looking for a volunteer Bible study leader.

Ligh took on the role and loved it. The following year, she worked three-quarters time with the ministry. While she loved the work she was doing, at times Ligh felt that she was theologically misaligned with the ministry.

Through her church she got to know the Reformed University Fellowship campus minister working at Columbia, Eric Lipscomb, and decided to transition to serving with RUF. Working with RUF meant Ligh needed to raise support rather than simply receiving a paycheck, but still, the transition was smooth. She started with RUF in 2020 and says she loves all of it.

“I enjoy seeing the Bible come alive for the students,” Ligh said. “I can see it in their faces when I lead studies.”

Ligh said training people in the church on how to read the Bible under the umbrella of “discipleship” is analogous to strength training in sports. Like sports training, Bible study doesn’t directly impact performance the way specific drills might, but it enhances overall performance and reduces the chance of “injuries,” like spiritual abuse, false teaching, or burnout from serving.

“In terms of ministry, discipleship often takes the form of training people in evangelism, prayer, apologetics, parenting, marriage, faith in the workplace,” she said. “We assume people know how to read the Bible when in fact the Bible is an ancient text written in a different language, and making meaning out of it in our English versions is not an intuitive task.” 

Some students give feedback that they had never read the Bible like she shows them.

“For me, that was the way I found Christ,” she said. “I was wary of emotionality, so I was never going to become a Christian because having a father who loves me from heaven is a nice thought. I needed it to be true for it to be a nice thought.”

She maintains a high view of Scripture and continues to use it to test out any theories she has. She encourages students to do the same. 

“The group that I’ve found that doesn’t enjoy the Bible studies with me are the ones who expect simplistic answers and expect the leader to give the answers.”

She remembers one particular time a student got especially frustrated.

“Why are you asking us all these questions?” the student asked. “Why don’t you just tell us what to think?”

“That is the opposite of what I want,” Ligh thought. “I don’t want a bunch of sleepy sheep.” She wants students to study, to question, and to see what God himself says. Because in her experience, those who don’t interrogate their faith will find it easily shaken in the university classroom.

Ligh brings more than a love of Scripture to her RUF campus staff ministry. Her time as a corporate consultant, educator, and mother provide the perspective and wisdom that college students need. She wishes more people who wanted to serve in campus ministry would step away from the campus for a few years to gain some life experience before returning to minister to students. 

She’s found everything she has experienced in her life enables her to relate better to students. 

“I think there’s plenty of commonality just from being an alum, but also because I had work in the corporate setting, and many of these students are going to end up there, I think there’s a way where I can imagine what they’re thinking and going through,” she said. 

When she tells them that there are more important things than a corporate job, she has the credibility of being someone who has had one.

“It’s like she’s an insider,” says Lipscomb. “She took the same classes that a lot of our students are taking.”

He said Ligh has been an incredible blessing with the ministry. When she first joined the RUF Columbia team, he would have said small groups were probably one of the ministry’s weakest areas. She’s changed that.

“Ava has actually turned what was our weakest point of our ministry into our strongest point of ministry.”

He’s found that the students are now better equipped to understand how to read the Bible and to apply it in their lives.

Lipscomb said Ligh has helped him better understand what it’s like to be a non-believer at a place like Columbia

“She can uniquely relate to students who are questioning or doubting or aren’t believers,” he said. “I think a lot of students just identify with her story in that regard.” 

At an RUF intern training event last fall, Ligh taught a workshop on leading small groups and Bible studies, and Lipscomb heard nothing but positive responses from those who attended her sessions. They described it as encouraging and lifegiving. 

“I think Ava is just a student of our students,” he said. “She is just so curious about how they tick and wants to serve them well.”

Reflecting on who she was and where she is now, Ligh can see how God’s hand was in every aspect of her life.

“Every tiny detail, including the crush that I had on the seventh grade guy, had to fall right into place for me.”

Adam MacInnis is a news reporter living in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.