Malachi Vincent (’17) has done a lot of things in his young life. At just 27, he’s already reached some seriously impressive milestones: the New York native created a startup fresh out of high school, attended seminary and a prestigious music school, worked as a business consultant, a pastor and got married. That alone is more than some people accomplish in their entire lives. But, to top things off, he ended up working at one of the most famous and influential Silicon Valley businesses of all time: Facebook.

This same man also holds a degree in business from a Bible college, which one could safely assume is not the typical trajectory for most of the 33,000+ employees at Facebook. So, how did he get there?

“The first and most important step was trusting God,” said Malachi. He explained that his move to San Francisco came as a part of a carefully considered decision – one he made before there was a job offer at Facebook, let alone in California. “My wife Sade and I were blessed to have a number of incredible Christian mentors and friends in the Lancaster area,” he said. “But the one thing that we never found was a home church. So as we talked and prayed about where God might be calling us, we thought, ‘What if we just described church using only the Bible? Would we say we have that where we are?’ Ultimately, the answer was no – so we reverse engineered the whole moving process. First, we searched for a church we felt God was calling us to. Then, we trusted God to provide us with jobs wherever that was.”

That decision led them to a church in San Francisco, California called We Are Church. The couple starting planning and preparing for the move, sensing a feeling of confirmation from God. “I won’t lie and say it was easy,” laughed Malachi. “There were times in between the move and job offer when money was tight and we were anxious. Anxious, but still we trusted God. At the time, I was consulting for a few businesses in the Lancaster area and had another job offer at a tech company in New York City, but I still really felt in my spirit that God was calling me to be a part of the church in San Francisco.” God’s timing, as they say, is perfect. Shortly thereafter, Malachi was contacted by a recruiter from Facebook.

While Malachi had been in touch with various contacts at Facebook for a few months, things really fell into place in April 2018. The interview process was intense and thorough. Ultimately, Malachi was selected for a job at the Fortune 100 Company. Today, he works as a Product Development Specialist for Messenger. He manages a team to complete daily workflows in the investigation and triaging of internal reports on quality and stability, and develops new strategies and tactics through Machine learning for delivering high-quality products to end users at scale. Or, as he put it, “It’s basically Facebook using Facebook for Facebook to make Facebook better.” Simple, right? Hardly. But there’s a reason some of us work at tech companies while others don’t.

It’s obvious why Malachi was the right fit for the company. He’s high-achieving, smart and a quick study, a fact his former professor and mentor Martin Sauer readily confirmed. “One of the things that we really want to do at LBC is connect with each student individually and guide them into areas that fit their skill set,” said Sauer, the program director of LBC’s business administration program. “What really set Malachi apart as a student was that he was teachable and open to critique. That’s a rarity. I’m excited to see how God is going to use him, both now and in the future.”

Malachi says it’s the relationships he forged with faculty members at the college that really made an impact in his life. “I ultimately chose to attend Lancaster Bible College because I knew the professors and staff would invest in me as a person,” he explained. “At the time, I was trying to scrape together the money to study at LBC. The president of the college, Dr. Teague, Sauer and Quentin Frey and other staff and faculty at LBC helped me to find scholarships to cover the cost of tuition. They later became close mentors and friends even to this day. That really confirmed that I was making the right choice.” Malachi explained that there was something about his education at LBC that set it apart from other experiences he had. “It wasn’t so much what I learned at LBC,” he explained. “It was the character that it built in me. Being at truly a Christian institution helped me to learn how to properly steward of all that God was calling me to be and do.”