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!!!

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.

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!

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