From Everywhere to Everywhere: ACF’s Globalscope Story
By Perry Rubin
Perry Rubin has served as campus minister with Auburn Christian Fellowship at Auburn University in Alabama since 1993. For more than three decades, he has helped ACF become a place where students and young adults are equipped to follow God’s call, including many who have gone on to serve with CMF and Globalscope around the world.
When my wife, Laura, and I began leading Auburn Christian Fellowship in 1993, two prayers were especially important to us: that God would use ACF to raise up Kingdom leaders ready to join him in his mission, and that ACF would become a place where young ministers could be trained and prepared to lead in that mission.
More than 30 years later, I’m amazed at the ways we’ve seen God answer those prayers, especially through our relationship with CMF and Globalscope.
My own connection with CMF goes back even further. In 1985, I was a missionary recruit hoping to serve in East Africa among the Maasai. That particular plan never happened, but when God eventually led me to Auburn, missions remained a central part of my calling. From the beginning, ACF sent students on Reach Internships and developed our own ministry internship for graduates who wanted a place to serve, learn and listen for God’s direction.
Then Globalscope opened another door.
A relationship grows
Globalscope launched its first campus ministry in Mexico City in 2000 through a partnership between CMF and Georgia Tech Christian Campus Fellowship. A few years later, I had opportunities to visit Globalscope ministries in Mexico City and Santiago, Chile.
During a 2006 trip to El Oasis in Santiago, I met Cristina Martinez, a young Chilean Christian who was considering a future in ministry. I invited her to spend a year as a ministry intern at ACF.
Cristina came to Auburn that fall, becoming the first of what would eventually be many young adults from Globalscope ministries around the world to serve and learn with us.
Her year at ACF proved to be only the beginning. She went on to seminary, married and has spent many years serving in local church ministry.
Since Cristina arrived, ACF has welcomed a steady stream of interns whose lives were shaped by Globalscope ministries. They have come from Unterwegs in Germany, Canvas in England, La Ruta in Uruguay and El Pozo in Mexico.
And the impact has gone both directions.
These international interns have helped our Auburn students see the global Church differently. They’ve brought different perspectives on faith and discipleship, expanded our understanding of God’s Kingdom and challenged our students to be more open to going wherever God might send them. Many of these interns have gone on to serve in ministry themselves, including several who have joined Globalscope teams.
At the same time, Auburn students have served for semesters at Globalscope ministries around the world, and God has raised up 14 ACF alumni who have spent four to 10 years serving as Globalscope campus ministers. Three more are preparing to serve with El Pozo in Puebla, Mexico.
And then the story came full circle
In 2022, my daughter Rachel called from Montevideo, Uruguay. She had helped plant La Ruta and was serving on the Globalscope team there. One of their students, Lucía Suarez, had become a Christian through La Ruta and was discerning whether God might be calling her into ministry.
Rachel asked if Lucía could come to Auburn and intern with us.
Of course, we said yes.
Lucía served first as a ministry intern and then as a ministry resident. By the end of that experience, she was convinced God was leading her toward vocational ministry. When a position opened on our staff, she applied, and suddenly a young woman who had first encountered Jesus through a Globalscope ministry in Uruguay was doing campus ministry with university students in Auburn.
And she wasn’t the last.
Gabi Coss, who became a Christian through El Pozo in Puebla, came to ACF as an intern and resident and eventually joined our staff. Carlos Julio came from La Ruta in Uruguay for what was initially going to be a semester, but during his time here began sensing a call to ministry and returned for further training. And on an ACF spring break mission trip to El Pozo, we met David “Davicho” Guillien, who eventually made his own way to Auburn to learn and serve with us.
So, as we begin the 2026-27 school year, I get to look around our ACF ministry team and see something remarkable: joining me and Joey Luria, a product of our ministry at ACF, are Gabi and Davicho, whose stories include El Pozo in Mexico, and Carlos Julio, whose story includes La Ruta in Uruguay.
Students reached through Globalscope ministries in other countries are now helping university students encounter Jesus right here at Auburn.
From everywhere to everywhere
CMF frames its mission as “from everywhere to everywhere.”
At ACF, we get to see what that looks like.
For more than 25 years, Globalscope missionaries and ministry partners have invested in university students around the world, creating communities where they can encounter God and experience the life-changing love of Jesus. We’ve had the privilege of sending some of our own students to be part of that work.
And now some of the fruit of those ministries is coming back to us.
The young adults who were welcomed, loved and discipled in Globalscope communities in Uruguay and Mexico are now doing the same for students at Auburn University. People who were once on the receiving end of someone else’s willingness to go are becoming the ones who go.
For Laura and me, there is something particularly meaningful about that. More than 30 years ago, we prayed that ACF would be a place where God would raise up Kingdom leaders and prepare them to join him in his mission.
We could never have imagined all the places those prayers would take us, or all the places from which God would bring people back to Auburn.
It’s a small glimpse of God’s mission coming full circle.
And what a privilege it has been to watch it happen.