November Ministry Blog

I want to start, as you do with things about November, with being thankful. I first want to thank everyone who has been a part of my support team so far! You all have made this very exciting and very fulfilling job possible and I am so grateful! I am also very thankful for the team I have been working with. I have been working through a bunch of stuff, primarily with how to think about things, and the team I am with has been so supportive and helpful in getting my mind right. I guess last for now, I am really grateful for my co-small group leader Riley. Riley has done a lot in helping me run our small group and with growing the guys in our group. He is so smart, and has such a good understanding of the word, and I am blessed by that a lot. Now, on to what happened in November.

This month, I have been training some of the small group leaders how to be effective in evangelism. If I am honest, a couple of them definitely taught me more than I taught them! We went through the comet cafe and met a bunch of new people. One person I met with a student was a guy named Ethan. Ethan used to be a Mormon, but when we met him, he had left the church and considered himself no longer religious.  The student I was with challenged him to think about what happiness he was pursuing. He thought about it and decided that he hadn't actually thought about that. Ethan was invited and came to check Focus out. He hasn't been consistent, but in my conversations with him, I have seen him making an effort to decide what he is looking for in life. I think of this as a great victory. I believe if he seriously continues to search, that he will conclude that God is what will bring him happiness. 

This month we also had our giant all campus class we call Pizza Theology. Pizza Theo is basically 4 hours of learning about a theological topic, with one hour of eating Pizza for dinner in the middle. As you can imagine, it is very popular with University students. This year we had Mary Poplin, a former assistant to Mother Theresa, come and talk to us about different world views. We primarily focused on secularism, as it is the most popular line of thought in our culture today. She taught the students a lot about what secularism was, and why it just couldn't work as a line of thought. She taught about a lot of ways in which secularism and the other lines of thought, fall short and ultimately are left without full answers for most of life's big questions. Secularism can't answer where we come from for example, as without God, the beginning of time is just impossible and implausible. Though it was long, it was very cool, and it was awesome to hear from someone with such a cool life experience. 

November got cut a bit short due to the thanksgiving break, but before we let the students go, we had our first part of the Keep Focus Growing campaign. With $5000 in matching funds for the students, we did a push to have them try to give extra during the last week of November, and they really came through. They got all of the matching funds, and then some. Before we even added in that $5000, they had raised around $9100. That is just insane, but such a huge blessing! It was so cool to see them rise to the occasion, and also to see just how much they care about seeing Focus grow. 

Our last service of November was also done kind of differently. Instead of a traditional service like we normally do, we had stations set up to recap our Ephesians series, based on the different messages in Ephesians. We had a station for them to lay things at the cross, share the things on their heart, and others. I personally like the station we set up about thankfulness, based on Paul's thanksgiving introduction. It was really cool to share some things I felt, and to hear how some students where thankful to me. 

(Pictures from the Ephesian's wrap up)