April

 Hey folks,

I know, I know, you just heard from me! Not trying to spam you I promise, but I am trying to get out some updates and communicate with you all more frequently. 

Thank you to all of you who commented for us and the rest of the religious orgs last month! It's another way you were able to support us, and in this case not just us but religious freedom for a lot of people! We are waiting to hear what the updates on that will be. 

You saw this as you opened the email but this is a picture of all of our student leaders at the Denton Campuses (UNT and TWU) Great group of leaders that we have the privilege of serving with and leading!

Jude is loving learning right now! He's got counting to 10 down and is getting there with his ABC's. He loves his pre-preschool, as we call it. It's a really fun time with him and we're loving it. 

Our Church (Denton North Church) Spent a day out at the lake last weekend, and it's a little hard to tell but this picture is a mix of some of our college students, adults, and families all walking down to the lake together. It's been really neat as we get to stay and see our church transform from mostly college students to more young families and integration between the current college students and the graduates and families is really good to see!

We just finished our sermon series on stories from Luke. I preached this last week on Luke 11:1-13, which is all about prayer and how we come to God with our prayers. Come to the Lord boldly and with the recognition that he is our good and loving father who we can go to about anything!

We're starting a new series for these last few weeks of the year that is going to be about maturity and growing up in Christ. We're going to be going through the book of Ephesians, which is perfect since Paul is responding to the situation in Ephesus with lots of calls for maturity and living out the calling Christ has for us. 

I'm excited to get to cover another whole book of the Bible. One of our constant goals in college ministry is to promote and produce more Biblical literacy. Many students are unfamiliar with large chunks of scripture and so we like to take these opportunities to cover different books of Scripture. In this case, we're responding to needs we're seeing for more maturity in our students, and so Ephesians was a perfect fit. 

Along with that book, we're going to be utilizing this book above, Practice Resurrection, by Peterson, where he is going through Ephesians as well, and reflecting from his many decades as a Pastor on how we grow in Christ and how we live lives of resurrection. It's getting at us learning to live lives that are congruent with the calling God places on us to be mature in Christ, and therefore we begin "practicing" lives that reflect our future resurrected state when heaven and earth are made new and we all will live fully resurrected lives. I'm excited to dive into this with our students!

Please be praying for our meetings with students. I know I just talked about sermons and that is all great, but most of what we spend our days and weeks doing is meeting up with students and studying the Bible or helping our leaders think through how to minster to their peers as we minister to them! We need lots of prayer for this everyday task, it's always happening!

Thank you for praying and supporting. Please let me know if any things are happening with you all that I can be praying for, I love hearing from you!