Astounded

Astounded

Our pastoral team is amazed and overwhelmingly grateful for how God has shown up these last two weeks. It’s been one of the most amazing first couple weeks of the year that I’ve seen. This update is a little long, but it’s a good ride. As we were preparing for the year Darby kept feeling the Lord prompt her to pray for more people than we knew what to do with. Apparently, that prayer would be answered.

First off, we started by jumping into outreach as freshman were moving onto campus and having their orientation sessions. We saw a bunch of students come to each event and so many would be at everything we put on that week. I personally met so many freshmen that were specifically looking to get involved in something to grow their faith while in college. We were playing board games in the student union and were asked to leave because there were to many people assembling. That in itself was a bit frustrating, but as we were moving, I got to talk to the student who works for the union that was asking us to move, and he was not only Christian, but wanted to get involved in our ministry! He was just being forced by his managers to move us but gave us tips on how to do evangelism there in the future. He ended up joining my small group and has been so happy to get plugged into our community!

We had our corefa (student leader) retreat that weekend, and 3 of our students got baptized there! It was so sweet to see, and overall, we saw the students become refreshed and excited for what God has in store for us this year.

The following week we kept the pressure on and did outreach as classes officially started up. We kept seeing similar cool God moments as the week before. I sat down with a random student for lunch one day (turned out to be a linebacker for UNT, and he was Christian!) and once that conversation ended the student sitting next to us asked if I was part of a ministry, because he was trying to find one. Cool stories like that were happening every day!

It’s often hard to tell how all our efforts to meet people are going throughout the week. We are being faithful with showing up, but we really have no idea how many people we are reaching, that is until Thursday Night Fellowship. We reserved a bigger room than we had than last year, and it still wasn’t enough. We had people sitting on the floor and standing in the hallway. We had 293 students show up for our first worship night of the year! For context, 2 years ago the most we ever had was around 150 people. So, in the last 2-3 years we’ve about doubled in size! God is doing some amazing things! I’m not normally a guy who is super into tracking numbers like that, but it’s just been astounding what God has been up to.

Our staff is feeling a bit overwhelmed but also immensely grateful. Join us in praising God for how He’s worked these last couple weeks! Be praying that these students stick around and decide to plug in and invest in their faith! Pray that our staff has both the energy and discernment to handle this growth wisely and well. Pray that this is only the beginning of the astounding stuff God will do this year!