By John Harrell
Ministry Incubators staff
“Worship me.” That’s what Olivia Eckart Williamson experienced as God’s call to her when she was a senior in high school: to worship the Lord, with her school as the venue.
She remembers being at a restaurant with a friend, three hours into planning for a student-led worship event, and seeing the word enlightened. It had been printed on a piece of paper that was sitting on the table.
That’s when she knew she had the name for her venture. “We need to tell our peers the call that we have,” she said a half-decade later of her vocation then, “and enlighten them on the call to do ministry in our school. It’s a mission field.”
That’s how Enlightened Students was born, a ministry that grew to the nationwide youth-empowerment movement that it is today—one that sees high schoolers leading worship events with their peers, and which God uses to catalyze healing amid cultures of violence and despair that can often take root within a school’s walls.
Williamson knew that she was on to something when she came to one of Ministry Incubators’ early Hatchathons back in 2017, and the process helped her to clarify and refine what she wanted to accomplish.
“The biggest thing I took away from Hatchathon was how to communicate your vision,” she says, “how to be really clear about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Because when you have a chance to present your passion and what you feel maybe God calling you to do—what you feel like you need to do with your life—you sometimes only have a few moments. And so Hatchathon really helped me find that sweet spot.”
As the ministry has grown, it has joined forces with Never The Same, a ministry startup led by Williamson’s father, the Rev. Geoff Eckart, which has seen student-led prayer ministries so impactful for a school’s climate that grades have been known to rise.
Now, Enlightened Students has a portfolio of 50 events completed in just seven years, including a 2021 summer tour. When the pandemic hit, Williamson and her team pivoted online and served over 2,000 youth, including in places far enough afield that they wouldn’t have been able to reach them otherwise. In all, over 5,000 students have been impacted through Enlightened Students since its inception. During this year’s tour, 18 students were baptized—all but two of them spontaneously in answer to a call to new life in Jesus.
“I don’t know where Enlightened Students would be today if I didn’t have a space to learn,” she says, looking back on that early Hatchathon—“to experiment on some things, to try some things—but to hear advice from people who have done” the work of innovation before.
As she looks ahead to the next horizon—more schools blessed by the love of Jesus, more students’ lives and futures changed, more communities made healthier—she stands rooted in a moment of courage and obedience to Christ’s call. It was the moment when she said “yes” to a Lord who calls high schoolers to take Jesus’ love to the world.
Check out Olivia’s ministry
- Enlightenedstudents.com
- Instagram:
- @enlightenedstudents
- @itsoliviawilliamson
Enlightened Students closely partners with Claim Your Campus, a student-led prayer movement.
Learn more about the impact of CYC here:
- The Marion High School Story
- Claimyourcampus.com
- Instagram: @claimyourcampus
I call myself a finder, and not a founder. Why? Because this whole thing was an idea I sort of stumbled into. In March of 2018, with just a hunch about the importance of indoor play spaces and the dream to see families united, two friends and I brought a very vague idea to the Hatch-a-thon, an event designed to launch new social enterprises. But even after a couple days of innovative design thinking and coaching, we were stuck. We were struggling to answer the questions, and when we did finally work out a response to one of the prompts, the room applauded for us because they knew we were struggling, too. It was a stretching and humbling experience.
We turned our idea over to the play experts and let them lead us. At first, we stood back and watched them reimagine the boxes. But they wanted to take us with them, so we followed—climbing, crawling, and creating along with them. Sure, we all got lice from the boxes we pulled out of the dumpsters for our experiment… and sure, we had a huge mess to clean up in the living room afterwards (read: pulling scraps of cardboard and tape off the carpet for weeks), but in the end my oldest son declared, “Mom, I want to keep this forever!” I believe it was in this moment that WonderSpace was found. I know my son didn’t mean that he wanted to keep the cardboard forever, and he certainly didn’t mean he wanted to keep the lice… so what was it that he wanted to keep forever? He wanted to keep the same thing I wanted to keep—a sense of wonder and togetherness.
This became my hope for WonderSpace: to provide a place for family formation—that long after the materials are recycled, there remains a long-lasting impact on our children, families, and community from the play we experience together.
Fast forward to March of 2019. WonderSpace now has the support not only of one local church, but of other local churches in the area as well. The Community Foundation of Grant County has awarded us a grant along with two other anonymous foundations. Because we don’t have funding yet to buy a permanent building, we have designed 3 mobile play exhibits that can be packed into a 26-foot moving truck and moved around the city for “pop up play events.” We have opened WonderSpace to the community twice (once in a church and second in a school gymnasium) and have already experienced playing with over 400 people from Grant County. I have met so many new people in our city in these past 12 months and have become friends with many. Even in the designing phase, WonderSpace is doing exactly what we had hoped! We’re building friendships, meeting our neighbors, and creating a sense of togetherness.
I call myself a 
Through prayer and through the relationships 
