A Month Shortened

Students went home at thanksgiving break, so doing ministry this month was shortened even more than in other years. Since most of my ministry to students has been online this semester anyway, how I ministered didn't change as much as others did. Even still, after December 4th, my weekly meetings with student leaders and my other one on ones moved to a less frequent basis. Because of this, my priority, and the rest of the staff at UTD, shifted to planning for the Spring. The focus of our staff meetings became more focused on what is the campus doing, and what can we do to continue reaching and discipling students. We decided to have what we call a blue sky day early in the week before Christmas, to nail down some plans and to spend time thinking more pastorally about the matters at hand. To explain, Blue Sky Day is an extended (about 6 hour) meeting where we compile a list of topics and try to solve the problems if the sky is the limit. Many great ideas that we will be implementing in January came from this. We will be having a short set of classes for students called Engage Class beginning January 31st. The goal of these classes is one, to get the students to hear from more of our staff, since this school year, most of us haven't preached. Second, it is to cover topics more focused on growing people into leadership. Topics like Spiritual Formation, Being a Disciple, Spiritual Friendships, Commitment, and much more will be covered under the blanket of these classes. 

Apart from all of this planning, we as staff got to hear our apprentice's first sermons. All seven of them did a great job. The seven of them gave their 20-30 minute sermons back to back on Thursday the 17th, and while that made the day long, it was so cool to hear from them and to see the power of the Gospel at work in their lives. Many of them were so open and vulnerable about the ugliness of sin in their lives, but also about how different they were because of someone coming into their life bringing good news and hope. It was overall very encouraging, and I am excited for them to continue to grow as preachers in the next few months. 

I apologize for the lack of pictures this month, I didn't get to be as involved as I was normally like to be this month because I had to spend 9 days in quarantine. My wife and I are okay, and we don't have covid, but we had a really close exposure, so it is only by the grace of God we made it out okay. I did say last month that I had good news to share, and that is that my commitment has been extended through the 22-23 school year! I am very excited to be able to continue at this work, which has been so unbelievably fulfilling. Thank you to you all for making this possible! Here is this month's student testimony: