Skip to main content

February

This is the time of year that the community often starts to feel like family to each other. Winter Camp has come and gone, filled with so much of God working (which I'll get to shortly) and cores have been meeting together and sharing life in that group and 1-1 in Bible studies for half of a year now, and the relationships are deepening. It's a time to start looking more outward, to bring new students into what these students have been building with each other. Along with families though, as we all know, comes a fair share of challenges, which I'll share some of those in the prayer request section down below. But first, winter camp!

Briefly, in case you don't know, Winter Camp is our yearly camp with all of our campuses together. It falls on the first weekend of school starting back up, and it's four days together worshiping God, learning about scripture, and having fun together. This year some 500+ students gathered from across DFW to learn about Psalms, and it was such a great camp! Here's a link to a video one of our alumni took and put together for us:
https://www.facebook.com/EverywhereSean/videos/10221470219174683/UzpfSTE1MjY4ODkzMDI6MzA2MDYxMTI5NDk5NDE0OjEwOjA6MTU4MzA0OTU5OTozNDcyOTUwNzAwNTE4MzI2MzY2/

Here's a link to the lectures during the weekend in case you're interested in hearing what was taught!
https://anyfocus.org/resources/media-page/
(They're the talks dated 1/28/20)

Big announcement though, our annual Spring Showcase 2020 is only two weekends away!
I would LOVE for you guys to come to this if you can! It's a really great date night or just fun night out with yourself or friends, and it goes to support our students going to a training conference in Washington that gives them tools to go back to their campuses and lead small groups, minister to their peers, and reach out to the lost people at their colleges. It's an incredibly worthy cause, and you'll also get a super fun and entertaining night out of it. We have multiple talented people performing songs, doing improv and a ton of art and original content for sale in our art sale besides the show. Please consider making it out!

Prayer requests:

  • Mental health challenges seem to be continuing to be prevalent in the form of anxiety and depression for our students. Please lift them up in prayer in this area.
  • Confession and living in the light 1 John 1:5-10 is an area our community is growing in right now. Please pray for continued attention to this in the student's lives, and that they would be open to the Spirit leading them to live more in the light with their brokenness so that they can begin to let God heal them and change them. 
Thank you so much for all you do to support and pray for campus ministry!

Ryan

Comments

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'...

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...

January

Hello all, I hope you had a Happy Christmas and a good New Years. We are back after a break for the holidays and in the midst of planning for winter retreat. We have a speaker, Dr. Lee from Fuller university coming in to speak to our entire student ministry about "Disruptive Grace." I'm excited to hear what he has to share and see the impact and growth from camp this year. It's always a special time!  At the local level in Denton, we are ready to start another spring semester. Our sermon series this semester is going to be about fear. Based around the John passage on "perfect love drives out fear" Given the rise every year it seems of anxiety and fear in our student body, we feel it's a timely topic and hopefully will minister the truth of God's word back into those thoughts and feelings.  Please pray for our winter retreat! It's looking like a very cold one. BRRRR. Hopefully we can make it excellent still. Love you all, thank you for your suppor...