Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Important Details Enclosed Inside

If you ever have the opportunity to be on a Q&A panel with your mentors, do it. You get to look more important than you are without answering any questions. More about this event (Pizza Theology) below!


Hello! I have a veritable smorgasbord of updates this month.

First things first: I have committed to staying on FOCUS for an additional 4 school years after this one! I'm excited about this- I can't wait to see what God does in me as a minister, and what He does on our campuses. 




Pizza Theology
I tried something new- drawing my slides by hand! It was a lot of work, but I loved getting to communicate my thoughts visually.

One of our goals as a ministry is to be "intellectually vibrant." Since we serve college students, we want them to pursue learning about Scripture at a college level. One of the ways we push this is through a once-per-semester event called Pizza Theology. Students from all of our campuses gather in one place for 2 hours of learning, an hour of pizza, and then two more hours of learning. 

This time around, we talked about the book of Exodus, with talks on the place of Exodus in the Torah, the narrative of Exodus, the Law, the Tabernacle, and the themes Exodus introduces into Scripture that come up in the New Testament. I got to talk about the narrative of Exodus, which meant about an hour of teaching (luckily, we did a Pizza Theology on Exodus 5 years ago, and I got to adapt a talk previously given by Brianna Marble). 

I was amazed by how engaged our students were throughout this, and I believe God really showed up and made the story of Exodus and what it says about Him come alive for us. 

https://anyfocus.org/media/exploring-exodus-pizza-theology/
^Go here to give it a listen!


Prayer Walks
In an effort to continue to push our community towards growth in prayer and intentionality on campus, we're taking a week to walk around campus once a day and pray for God to be working and bringing down spiritual barriers (think Jericho) at UTD. It's been amazing to see how the Spirit begins to lay things on our hearts and speak through us as we go!


Spring Showcase!
Every year, we send our potential student leaders from all of our campuses to a conference called SICM (Student Institute of Campus Ministry) to learn how to be disciple-makers for Christ on their campuses. In order to help them pay for this, we put on a concert and art sale called Spring Showcase, and it's always way, way better than I expect it to be! Please consider coming- I promise it's a good cause, and you'll enjoy yourself :)



Prayer
  • Please pray for our SICM students as they raise funds to go learn how to do campus ministry for a week in Washington! That's a very impactful trip, and we really want to see these students be able to participate in it without worrying about money.
  • We've encountered a lot of students recently who are interested in following Jesus, but have intellectual and heart-level barriers in their lives. Please pray for God to show Himself to these students and remove those barriers.