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

Hey all, I'm thankful you're taking the time to read this. I want to give you guys some more peeks into what we've been doing at Collin, and there's a lot that's been happening this month! First, I want to again thank you guys for all your support and prayers. I can't thank you enough for continuing to be a part of God's work on these campuses. I am truly convinced that God is working in the lives of these college students, and that for many of them, this will reshape their life as they go out and live in our society. We still want to bring people to the realization that Jesus is Lord and make fired up disciples who will go out into the world and spread that good news over and over. So thank you again for being a part of that. March was a great month for a lot of reasons. Early on in March, during Collin's spring break, me and a few of the other guys from our FOCUS ministry at Preston Ridge got to drive down to Big Bend National Park. We camped for ...
1 comment
Read more

Next on the List: Summer and a Son

 We're back to summer!  Denton FOCUS just finished the end of our Spring 2021 semester, and we went out with a bang after a year that started all spread out into little groups.  Our end of the year Denton FOCUS party We got to do our end of the year party all together! Our small group and 1-1 ministries thrived in the midst of the pandemic but there's nothing like a big group gathering where you can see everyone in the community together and fellowship. We're thankful we at least got to do this at the end of the year. We're also looking forward to this summer. We're doing Summer FOCUS on Thursday nights all together (not just denton but all the campuses across DFW) We're all ready to see everyone back together worshipping and learning at that, so be praying for that to be a good way to build some momentum back up for the fall, and that we stay safe! These are all the student leaders that we had on our small group team this year. So many people! They each co-lead...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beat of a Different Drum

Hello all! Another school year has come to a close here, and this one marks the end of working at the Collin Campuses and moving over to work at UNT TWU and NCTC in Denton. More on that to come in the next few months, but first let me update you guys on some of what's been going on here the last couple months. The three pictures above are from an outreach time at our Spring Creek Collin College campus. Our outreach time there has been particularly strong the past few weeks, as the students have really taken that on and have been showing up. This was a day where we were outside talking to students and inviting them to come hang out with us and have conversation. This has been a successful way over and over of getting past people's initial hesitancy to engage in something more serious right off the bat, and has led to a lot of people coming into community where they can start studying the bible and joining a small group led by our student leaders. God has been se...
Post a Comment
Read more