Skip to main content

New Year New _____

It's time for an update friends!

First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Years, and that you got to talk to or see people you love over the holidays. Nicole and I really enjoyed the time off during the break this year. We drove to New Mexico for a couple days with some friends and saw some really beautiful stuff (pictures below) and loved getting more time with Grant, Shayla, Kristen and Pedro. The rest of the break was so restful and enjoyable, and by the time the time off was coming to an end I was really looking forward to getting back to work and getting back at it! Previous breaks have been a lot more busy and I would come to the end of them almost as tired as before, but I'm really thankful that I think God is showing me how to rest and refresh well before getting back to the work to be done.

WINTER CAMP
This past weekend was our annual winter camp! We had our speaker John Stackhouse, a theologian who now teaches at Crandall University for the weekend, and it was really refreshing and encouraging for our students and our staff. He talked about how christians should live in our modern culture which was a really helpful topic for our ministry.

LEARNING
I wanted to give y'all some insight into the classes/learning portion of my job lately. We finished up our last class on Ian Provan's book "Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture" which was a really helpful resource for thinking through how we should reach scripture with right approach. This semester I'm taking a class on Exodus, where we're spending about a week per chapter reading commentary on it and discussing. So far it's been a lot of reading but Im excited to get some more time in the Old Testament!

I'm also preparing for a three part series on justice that we'll do later in this semester, so for prep I'm reading through some material on how God interacts with evil in the world, what justice from a Biblical standpoint looks like, and what part of our work as disciples falls into that realm. With so much talk on social media about justice, and seemingly so little action behind that talk, I want our students to have some time tor really think through what this should look like in their lives for the rest of their life.

Things to be praying for:

 - NCTC Our lil campus in Corinth needs to build a real sense of community on its own apart from UNT and TWU. Please pray for our students who help there to get a vision for it, and for God to send people our way who will want to be a part of what God is doing in that community.

- TWU similarly, TWU is in a big growing stage. This is a really exciting thing going on in our Denton ministries so pray that God will continue to bless that campus!

Thank you guys for all you've done to support me and this ministry! God is blessing us tremendously through your support!

A few NM pics:






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Amazing Start

 Hey all, Here to update you on the first few weeks of Denton FOCUS. It's been a whirlwind, we had two weeks of doing events on campus, lunches with new students, tabling and giveaways, big night events outside on campus playing capture the flag or lawn games. The 6 foot beach ball made multiple appearances :). It's been a really awesome start to the year, and so far the students have been responding really positively. By and large it feels like the ones we are meeting are interested in engaging, many of them wanting to get involved and even the ones who aren't are less hostile than some of our previous years, so that's something we are praising God for!  Our second TNF, last night. We got a bigger room thank goodness, our first week in a slightly smaller room had people lined up along the walls! Our first two Thursday Night Fellowships have seen a bit under 300 students show up, which is awesome! (Fo context, last year our biggest Thursday night was in the low 200'...
Post a Comment
Read more

April

 Baby #2 is here! Joni is now almost a month old, and she is getting used to life and everyone in her home. This is the first picture we've gotten of her smiling at me! Jude is a great big brother, always excited to give her kisses and hold her with us. It's very sweet. She is doing great! Eating and sleeping well.   Ministry is going well! I took a week off and enjoyed some family time and now I am back into the swing of things. The end of semester is fast approaching and we are finishing up our series on Philippians at Thursday Night Fellowships. Our small groups have had a GREAT year this year. I am so encouraged by the stories of people loving it so much that they invite their dorm mates and classmates.  We're going to have one more TNF this week and our community members are going to have a time to share the ways they have seen God move and work this year. I'm so excited to hear about what they're experienced and see our community encourage each other in this w...
Post a Comment
Read more

May

SICM time is here again! If you're not familiar with this event, this is our ten day trip up to Bellingham WA for leadership training and development of our newer students who show potential to be evangelists and disciple makers in their coming years in school. This year we're excited to bring 40 students from the Denton campuses alone, which is a huge growth spurt for us and we're waiting to see what kind of fruit comes from this over the coming years. I am going to be going this year again and it's always such a key time to get to know these future student leaders better.  We had our last TNF until June when we all meet together with all the campuses together. This last one we did something special and rented a big pavillion at Rockledge park next to grapevine lake. We had a great time of worship and honoring the departing seniors, as well as some fun swimming and playing together at the park! It was beautiful. Someone brought a huge ice chest of crawfish and we did a...
Post a Comment
Read more