Dealing with a death on campus

This past weekend, as I'm sure you may know, UConn cornerback Jasper Howard was stabbed to death outside the Student Union. It was a tragic event that has caused many to wonder how something like that could happen.

I would like to ask you to pray for UConn's athletes, many of whom were very close to Jasper. One of the football team's captains, Desi Cullen, is involved with Athletes in Action and is a leader on that team. He was with coach Randy Edsall during the press conference, and it was clear that Desi was shaken. Here's a quote from a UConn Daily Campus article:

"Desi Cullen spoke on behalf of the team, fighting to hold back his emotions. He broke down when discussing Howard's family.

"The idea that he will grow up without his father tears me apart," Cullen said."

Jasper's girlfriend was pregnant with his child, so you can also pray for her and that child. Please pray for Desi as well, as he seeks to minister to his fellow teammates in this incredibly difficult time.

Fall Getaway and more

Four weeks into the school year, we have a lot of great things to share. I'll keep the list brief:

- We've seen eight students pray to receive Christ. That's a very encouraging start.

- We've seen record numbers of students attend our UConn Students for Christ meetings - two weeks ago we had 150 present.

- We've done spiritual interest surveys with over a thousand students, and now have many hundreds of people to follow up.

- We had 23 kids at our first Student Venture kickoff event, and our first after school meeting is today.

- We had two students approach us and ask if we could help them launch an outreach ministry in the Asian community. What an answer to prayer!

- Our fall retreat is this weekend, and we have about 60 of us attending. Please pray for us as we gather together to learn God's word, fellowship together, and have a blast 2.5 hours from campus.

So all this in the first four weeks!!!

Start of the New School Year!

The summer has come and gone, and we are now in the first phase of what I call "catching the oncoming freight train" that is the beginning of the new school year. It is by far the busiest time of the year, as we seek to reconnect with returning students, establish contact with new students, and get all our programs up and running. As a friend of mine (former director at Syracuse, Nick DeCola) once said, it's like we start up a new church from scratch every year.

We return with great hopes and dreams. As of the end of last year, we had 200+ students involved in four key ministries:

- UConn Students for Christ (our traditional Campus Crusade ministry)
- reGeneration (our multicultural ministry)
- Athletes in Action (dedicated to the unique needs of student-athletes)
- Student Venture (for kids at Mansfield Middle School)

We also are involved with helping other campuses in the state (Quinnipiac, notably), and we are the lead campus for the partnership in Milan, Italy. To these efforts, we are looking to reach out more in four ethnic communities: the African-American, Hispanic/Latino, Indian, and international populations. Moreover, one of my primary assignments will be to raise up a STINT (short term international) team for Milan for 2010-11. That will not be an easy task, to find four qualified and eager staff who will choose to live in Milan for a year, working on several university campuses.

So we have a lot going on. Please pray for us as the school year begins!

End of the semester

It's been a couple of months since my last blog entry. Since then, here's all that we've seen at UConn:

- We wrapped up a Spring Break trip to Panama City Beach, Florida, where a ton of students got to experience evangelism for the first time.

- I took a team of staff and students from Dartmouth College to Milan, to continue the work we started a couple of years ago. In the process, we got to meet some great people from local churches and reconnected with some friends we met several years back.

- UConn won the women's NCAA basketball championship, going undefeated at 39-0.

- We had a two-week outreach when we brought in Cliffe Knechtle, a CT pastor and host of the show, "Give Me an Answer".

- We had our annual Fellowship Dinner, during which time God raised $22,000 for the campus ministry here at UConn.

- We graduated dozens of seniors who now leave our midst but who will continue to go on and make a difference for Christ for the rest of their lives.

- We have left for our summer assignments. Some 35 students will be involved in one summer missions opportunity or another - a UConn record.

So with all that, we hit the summer. Our big task is fund development. We have been hit very hard with the economy and need to raise approximately $800 in new monthly support. We also need to raise $6,000 to cover our expenses for our summer assignment, which is Staff Training out in Fort Collins, Colorado. Please pray for us along these lines.

Thanks!!!

JV

PCB

As I mentioned in my previous post on March 3, the UConn gang is down in Panama City Beach, Florida, for the Big Break, an evangelism conference par excellence. I want to offer a quick update from there.

I have spoken with a few of our students, and they're absolutely *loving* it. The conference is great, the housing is top-shelf, and they're getting tremendous opportunities to share Christ with college students there for spring break. Yes, there is much alcohol being consumed in PCB (not by our students, thankfully!), but that's what you get with spring break. Fortunately, our students are there, along with about 800 other Christians from across the country, bringing the light of Christ to what is a pretty dark place this time of year.

So please continue to pray for them as they learn and experience the joy of sharing their faith!

Hitting the Beach

In a few days, about 30 students involved with us will be heading to Panama City Beach, Florida, for our annual spring break trip. Normally we head to Florida, but the past few years we've done different things:

2006 - to New Orleans for Katrina relief work
2007 - to Vermont to help launch a Campus Crusade for Christ ministry at UVM
2008 - to Columbus, Ohio, to do some campus work on a variety of smaller schools in Ohio

And now, it's back to PCB for the conference we call, "Big Break". It'll be a great time of learning, growing, and experiencing personal evangelism on the sunny beaches and strip of this Gulf Coast town.

One of the most exciting parts of this trip is the number of students from reGeneration that are going: NINE. We were thrilled that so many would be able to make the trek down, and the Lord has provided all that they need to cover the cost.

Please, next week, remember to pray for these students and staff that will be driving down and back and seeking to make a difference in the lives of college students who flock to PCB from all across the country for their spring break.

Advice in these tough economic times

Everywhere you turn, there's news about the economy. Most of it, of course, is bad. Time for some encouragement, I think!

Karate master and actor Chuck Norris, I recently discovered, is a Christian. I wonder if he praises the Lord every time he kicks a bad guy through a window or door! Among his other things, he also writes a regular column, and in his latest, titled, "An 87-Year-Old's Economic Survival Guide" (found at: http://townhall.com/Columnists/ChuckNorris/2009/02/24/an_87-year-olds_economic_survival_guide), he tells us his mother's perspective on the situation. It's very insightful stuff, coming from a woman who went through the Great Depression. Here's her advice:

--"Get back to the basics. Simplify your life. Live within your means. People have got to be willing to downsize and be OK with it. We must quit borrowing and cut spending. Be grateful for what you have, especially your health and loved ones. Be content with what you have, and remember the stuff will never make you happy. Never. Back then, we didn't have one-hundredth of what people do today, and yet we seemed happier than most today, even during the Great Depression.

--"Be humble and willing to work. Back then, any work was good work. We picked cotton, picked up cans, scrap metal, whatever it took to get by. Where's that work ethic today? If someone's not being paid $10 an hour today, they're whining and unwilling to work, even if they don't have a job. The message from yesteryear is don't be too proud to do whatever it takes to meet the financial needs of your family.

--"Be rich in love. We didn't have much. In fact, we had nothing at all, compared to people today, but we had each other. We were poor, but rich in love. We've lost the value of family and friends today, and we've got to gain it back if we're ever to get back on track. If we lose all our stuff and still have one another and our health, what have we really lost?

--"Be a part of a community. Today people are much more alone, much more isolated. We used to be close with our neighbors. If one person had a bigger or better garden or orchard, they shared the vegetables and fruits with others in need. Society has shifted from caring for one another to being dependent upon government aid and welfare. That is why so many today trust in government to deliver them. They've forgotten an America that used to rally around one another in smaller clusters, called neighborhoods and communities. We must rekindle those local communal fires and relearn the power of that age-old commandment, 'Love thy neighbor.'

--"Help someone else. We never quit helping others back then. Today too many people are consumed with their own problems and only helping themselves. 'What's in it for me?' is the question most are asking. But back then, it was, 'What can I do to help my neighbor, too?' I love Rick Warren's book 'The Purpose Driven Life,' and especially his thought, 'We were created for community, designed to be a blessing to others.' Most of all, helping others gets our minds off of our problems and puts things into better perspective.

--"Lean upon God for help and strength. We didn't just have each other to lean on, but we had God, too. We all attended church and belonged to a faith community. Church was the hub of society, the community core and rallying point. Today people turn to government the way we used to turn to churches. It's been that way ever since Herbert Hoover's alleged promise of a 'chicken in every pot' and President Roosevelt's New Deal. Too many have abandoned faith and community. We trust in money more than God. And maybe that's a reason why we're in this economic pickle."

Food for thought today as we prepare for President Obama's State of the Union address tonight.

Evangelism - near and far

Our mission with Campus Crusade for Christ involves three key "distinctives" - Win, Build, and Send.

Win: to introduce students to the person of Jesus Christ
Build: to help students grow in their faith
Send: to equip students to win/build/send for a lifetime

I want to take just a minute or two to talk about two different experiences this past week in the "win" category. I titled this, "Evangelism - near and far" because the two means of evangelism for me this past week (well, the two stories I'm going to tell at any rate) couldn't be more different.

The first involves a couple of guys on the track team. Andrew is a guy who has been involved with our Athletes in Action ministry for several years, but is still gaining confidence in his new relationship with Christ. This past Thursday, he and I were meeting (it was supposed to be a larger AIA Bible study, but he was the only one who could make it.....ah, student ministry!) when all of a sudden his roommate, Anthony, showed up. He plopped down and we just started talking. He wondered what we were doing, so I explained about our small group. Then I started asking him some questions. It was clear that he had not thought of spiritual things for many, many years. His family had taken him to church until 2nd grade, and he hadn't been back since. Yet as I asked him some questions, he was able to articulate some of the things he had learned (the lesson: teach your kids well, because, really, they won't forget it).

The long and short of the conversation was this: I ended up sharing the gospel with him, and Andrew chimed in with some thoughts and a bit of his personal testimony. Anthony did not receive Christ, but heard probably for the first time how a person could enter into a relationship with Jesus. God provided us with an opportunity, and we took it.

The second story involves a strategy called "everystudent.com". This is a national website (check it out...it's great) that addresses so many of the important questions that people ask. We are doing this strategy on a number of Connecticut campuses, including Quinnipiac University. This past week I received an email from a student named Travis who asked me a ton of questions - some theological, some philosophical, but all interesting - and we have engaged in a back-and-forth email discussion since. He has asked me about Jesus' claims to be God, the historical evidence for the resurrection, the scientific evidence supporting theism, free will, prayer, and much more. Some questions probably are legitimate areas of inquiry for him, and others may be smoke screens to hide a deeper issue. In either case, I've been able to present a Biblical worldview that hopefully makes sense to him. I have never met Travis, but we've already engaged on a deep level thanks to the advance of technology.

So there you have it: evangelism near (Anthony) and far (Travis). Please feel free to pray for these two young men as they process our ongoing conversations!

Prayer Partners

One of the great joys of this year has been to meet regularly with two local pastors - Weston and Russell - for prayer. We get to UConn at 8:30 and usually pray until 9:30 or sometimes even 10:00. Interestingly, we meet on Monday mornings, when pastors usually take that day off. For me, it's a chance to link arms with fellow laborers, and it is so encouraging to know that they want to see us succeed.

Why do we pray together? It's tempting to pray for everything going on in our separate ministries, but the purpose of our time is to pray Great Commission-type prayers for the UConn campus. I know we've had lots of people praying for us over the years, and I'm extremely grateful for that. But I cannot even begin to adequately express the level of encouragement it has been to me to pray with these two guys.

By way of encouragement to you, if you don't have someone you pray with regularly, make a point of establishing something, at some point in your week. It's worth the investment!!!

Welcome to the blog!

I know that for many of us, the internet has provided a way to gather more information more quickly. Instead of going to the newsstand and buying the daily paper, we can now sit at home in our slippers and read the major stories in dozens of international newspapers at our desk. Yet this amazing age of technology also can drown us, as we have gadget upon gadget occupying our time.

Well, I fully recognize these realities but I wanted to provide you with a way to stay fully current with what's going on through the ministry at UConn. A monthly prayer letter is a great way to stay up to date, but my plan is to update the blog once a week. If I promise to do it more than that, I'll fall too far behind, but if it's less regular than that, I may as well just stick to the monthly prayer letters! So consider this my attempt at allowing you an inside window into the ministry in as close to "real time" as pragmatism allows.

For this first entry, I'll just share one quick story. Over the break we had our annual Boston Winter Conference, and the Sunday of the conference was a day of outreach in the city. I ended up going with two other students from UConn to Roxbury, near Northeastern University, and we witnessed to folks in the projects. One woman let us into her apartment and the two students got to sharing with her. Her boyfriend was there as well, and he seemed pretty interested, so I took him aside and had a separate conversation with him. It took us well over an hour, and by that time, the other students had finished their conversation and had left the apartment, leaving me alone with the couple!!

To make an hour-long story short, he was so moved by God that he gave his life to Christ right there. It was incredible to watch God work through the students as they stepped out in faith, and to watch God open a door for ministry and to witness a life changed before our very eyes.

These are the kinds of things we get to experience as God moves in our midst. What a privilege to be a part!!!

JV