Tilling the Soil

Summer is always an interesting time to be a campus pastor. Students are on break, and in a town like Denton that means a lot go back to their home cities over the summer. It’s always a bit of a bummer not being able to see some of these students as much, but in some ways, it can be helpful because we have so much planning and prepping for to do. I wanted to bring you guys into some of that so you can be praying over all the work we’re doing to till the soil in order to be ready to plant new seeds in the fall when school starts back up.

Support Raising

This is a big one for us over the summer! God continues to be so faithful and generous to us, and it’s been a great season of support raising so far! We’ve got about 400/month left to go to reach our goals, and we’re confident the Lord will get us there! Darby and I have been trying to meet up with different ones of you to catch up and connect, and we’ve absolutely loved it! It’s always great hearing how God is working in your lives and it’s a joy to share about how God has been working in our ministry as well. If we haven’t had a chance to connect yet I’d really love to find time to do that before the summer is out!

Selecting leaders

This is always a huge project for us in the summer. Our student leaders really are an extension of our pastoral team, and so selecting the right people to do that role is huge for us. This year we’ve actually had a unique problem, which is that we have too many people that are ready and eager to do that role! Last year we had 20 male student leaders, and this year we have 40 prospective leaders! On the women’s side it’s similar, they had about 30 last year and have around 40 this year as well. I’ve really loved meeting up with these different students, getting to know them more, and having the opportunity to talk to them about what it would look like to take another step in their journey to start discipling others as a leader in the ministry.

New Outreach initiatives

I believe I’ve mentioned before that we’ve been working on this idea about reaching these pockets of campus that are normally hard to break into. We already saw some progress on this during the Spring, but this next year we want to make a much bigger push into these new areas. This summer we’re trying to take that from an idea to an actual plan of action, plus figure out who is going to go implement that plan and how to support them well. It’s exciting stuff, but it’s also uncharted waters. It already feels complex to think through because of it being new, plus there is the added layer of how we might need to create new roles in order to reach that goal and how that might affect our existing structure. Adding this new initiative on top of having more leaders this year puts a strain on our pastoral teams already full plates. We’re thinking through what balance looks like in that and how to make sure we are faithful with what we have already. All of that needs a lot of prayer, so please join us in praying for that and if you’ve got any input, I’d love to hear it!

I’m excited for this next year to get underway; it really is shaping up to be a great one! Thank you so much for being part of all of it and supporting our mission here on these Denton campuses!