College Town
One of the cool things about working on campus is getting to spend time with so many talented students. The video below is one of our students named Ryan, who leads worship at our weekly meeting. He recently recorded a song about people’s spiritual needs on campus, and we wanted to share it with you!
Big Break
This week, it is spring break for one of the main campuses we work at. Campus Crusade provides opportunities for students to use their breaks to serve the Lord, and spring break is no different! This week, we and five SIUE students are at a conference in Panama City Beach, Florida along with 1,000 other students from 75 schools all over the country!
This week’s conference, called Big Break, is kind of an evangelism boot camp. Students spend their mornings hearing from the word and being trained in evangelism. Then, every afternoon we hit the beaches for about four hours to share the Gospel with the thousands of college students who come here for spring break every year. In the evenings, students hear teaching from the Word. It is wonderful! Every day, students are stepping out in faith to share their faith with students who are here looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places—parties, alcohol, drugs and relationships. We come here each year for exactly this reason: to be a light in a dark place.
This booklet is one of the main tools that we train students to use while sharing their faith - It’s a simple 4 point outline of the Gospel!
A group of guys being trained in how to use the Knowing God Personally booklet before they hit the beach for the very first time!
This girl is an international student from East Asia. She was invited by her Christian friend to come to the conference and last night she accepted Christ as her personal savior!
Training in Colorado
As new staff (i.e., people who have been on long-term staff for only just about a year), Campus Crusade continues to invest in our development by giving us opportunities for more ministry training. Last week, we took a break from our regular schedule on campus, and traveled out to Boulder, Colorado (our regional headquarters) for some training with other new staff from our six-state region. We heard some really helpful input from our leadership and veteran staff on things like what it means to grow as a leader, how we can continue to develop personally and in our own walks with the Lord, how we can be most effective with our time on campus, etc. We’re so thankful to be part of an organization that values our development—we feel really blessed.
On another note, one of the cool things about being gone from campus for a whole work-week is the opportunity it gave students to step up in their responsibilities and leadership of the ministry. Our student leadership team planned and ran our entire weekly meeting by themselves!
On our one “fun day” we got to experience Colorado a little bit by snowshoeing in the mountains. We were a bit sore the next day, but it was beautiful!
Our friend Emily!
Everybody JUMP!
King Karl
It was a beautiful day to be in the mountains.
Forgiveness
Text Messages
At our Spring Leadership Overnight, we spent an hour in prayer with our student leaders. As one of our prayer exercises, we asked students to make a list of 5-10 friends that they wanted to pray for consistently this semester. We took some time to pray for these friends, and then “surprised” students with this follow-up assignment: we asked them to immediately send a text message to each friend that they had prayed for, letting the friend know that they had just prayed for them. Since many of our students had put non-believing friends on their list, this was a bit of a scary task! But students were bold to follow through.
Our prayer was this step of faith would help spark spiritual conversations back on campus. Here is a story of a conversation that arose as a result Candice’s (of one of our SIUE student leaders) text messages:
“While I was doing the “text message” training from Leadership Overnight this past weekend, something incredible happened that I just had to share with you.
I texted a friend who I knew from high school and while I was on facebook she messaged me saying that it was nice. She expressed to me some issues she was facing at home with parents being confined to a wheel chair with Cerebral Palsy. I told her to pray on it and she responded by saying that she didn’t like praying for real. She said that she felt as if she was losing her strength, faith, and other things. So as I give her advice, I suddenly get the urge to tell her about the gospel. Through facebook, I did my best to summarize and share with the Four Laws. After that she decided to bring Christ back into her life and we prayed the prayer in the back of the Four Laws Booklet.”
Facebook has an instant-messaging feature, and it was through this that Candice was able to share the Gospel with her friend. The “Four Laws” is an evangelistic tool that we use to share the Gospel on campus. Click here to check it out. The prayer that she refers to is an example prayer in the booklet—it is a prayer that expresses the desire to accept Christ. Praise God with us for Candice’s boldness, and pray for her friend, Ashley, that she would begin to grow in her faith.