God is Moving at a New Campus

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year! Darby, Elias, and I spent most of our holiday season in Austin, connecting with family, which was so sweet.

Since students are still on their winter break, I wanted to take this brief respite from all the craziness to share one of the most amazing and exciting things God has been doing over the past semester: launching a ministry at NCTC!

I can’t believe I haven’t written about NCTC in these updates yet, but maybe it’s for the best — what God is doing on that campus deserves its own post.

NCTC is a local community college in the Denton area, with multiple campuses and over 10,000 students across its sites. Despite the large student body, campus life is nearly nonexistent. There are only a handful of student organizations — maybe two to five — and I’ve never actually seen any of them active on campus. On top of that, we’re the only Christian student organization across all their campuses.

Throughout my time in Denton, these campuses have felt incredibly lifeless. Corinth is the liveliest of the nearby campuses, but even there, you’ll only see about 5 to 10 students in the common area at any given time — and it’s rare to see them interacting or sitting together.

That paints a picture of a campus that seems like hard soil, but God hasn’t let that stop Him.

Last year, we connected with the Dean of Students at one of the campuses. She’s a believer and one of the kindest, most supportive people you’ll ever meet. This year, she told us, “Whatever you guys need, we’ll make it happen.” So, at the start of the semester, we began showing up on campus and doing outreach every day for a couple of weeks.

We’d approach the handful of students sitting around and invite them to join us for board games or other activities. To our surprise, almost every single one said yes! We quickly built a consistent enough group that we decided to start an NCTC-specific Bible study on campus instead of having them join the UNT small groups. Many of the students we met were immediately excited to participate.

As we continued outreach, we had moments that blew us away. One week, we invited students to the Bible study, and two of them said, “Yeah, let me go grab my Bible!” Those two have been attending almost every week since.

Now, we have a Bible study right in the middle of the common area each week, with 5 to 8 students regularly attending. That alone would have felt like a huge success, especially at a community college. But what’s amazed me even more is how eager these students are to engage beyond that. They attend other FOCUS events, spend time together outside of Bible study, join gatherings like Friendsgiving, and jump in to serve whenever they can. It’s been incredible to see how quickly they’ve caught the vision of building a Christ-centered community at NCTC.

I’ve been blown away by what God is doing. I don’t know what the future holds for this ministry. Since it’s a community college, most of these students will transfer to other schools after this year or next. But for now, I’m excited to see how God continues to work in their lives and what He’ll do next on this unique little campus!

The student testimony this month is one of my all time favorite guys! I've had the pleasure of meeting up with him over the past couple of years!