Skip to main content

Winter Retreat and More!

Hey all,

We're just a couple of weeks out from our Winter Retreat! It was a really encouraging time for us and for our students. We had many people who made decisions to follow Jesus at retreat or from conversations after. We are praising God for that. The talks were focused on Discipleship, how do we follow Jesus in every part of our life, with our identity and career and through hardship and also good seasons. Sounds basic maybe, but it's essential and we always have ways we need to renew our thinking about what that looks like in our lives. 

I've been thinking about 2 Timothy 4 which says:

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

I definitely have felt some of the description Paul uses here especially in verse 3-4. There's certainly a big part of our culture right now that feels like it pulls heavily to sources that reinforce what we want to hear. Algorithms even work that way. It can feel discouraging sometimes as a minister trying to speak truth to a congregation who spends hours each day being shaped by media and algorithms and you might get a hour or so a week to speak into their lives as best as you can. I think that's where the great patience and careful instruction part is helpful. We can be urgent without being impatient. We can be emphatic without being haphazard and not careful in how we teach complex topics and challenges. God is certainly patient with us. We've been doing this series on Identity and Idolatry on Thursday Nights for our sermons, and this has certainly presented a lot of opportunities to learn how to do this well. Few things seem to ping gen Z more than the topic of identity. Our culture has definitely shaped warped views of this in some pretty serious ways. The gospel is good news to this confusion. God created us, made us to reflect his image, and to find who we are and our meaning through relationship with him. Please pray four our ministers and student leaders as we try to live out this passage of scripture in our daily ministry situations! We need wisdom and guidance from the Spirit. 

Thank you for your continued support and prayers. You make doing ministry possible and I am so thankful. 

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