Planting Seeds

This past month the FOCUS interns have been given the task of devoting weekly time to evangelism on all six of our campuses. We are divided into the Dallas team and Denton team. Our Denton team consists of the four interns at UNT and TWU (Sarah, Grant, Matt, and I). The Denton team decided to center our evangelism events around the question of "Who is God?" Our goal statement is: to stir up an atmosphere of curiosity and exploration of God's character so that people get personally invested in the question of who God is. We set up some displays with pictures to facilitate conversation and to get people thinking about God's character. One of the questions we came up with that was pretty challenging to some was "What does God care about?" We posted pictures of the following options for people to discuss: Humor, Social Justice, Politics, Women, Homosexuals, Poverty, the American Dream, and Science.

I was able to have some pretty neat conversations with students about what they really believed. Many of them answered the question of what God cares about with "Well, everything!" However, once I began to probe a bit more by asking questions like "Do you think he cares about some things more than others? What about humor? Does he care about that as much as social justice?", people realized that it wasn't an easy question to answer. One memorable conversation I had was with a student at TWU. He told me that he grew up in the church but after years of research and personal questioning, he decided to identify himself as agnostic. He said that it was easy for him to get on board with Jesus but the God of the Old Testament was hard to understand. Why did God allow genocide? Why did God kill people that disobeyed Him? Is that loving? 

As interns we have been studying the Old Testament very intensively and have run into some of the same questions. Ultimately though, we are learning that we can never understand everything about God. We won't have all the answers. We're not meant to! But God's got it. He will take care of it. All we have to do is have faith and trust that his ways are better than our ways. This TWU student was very impressed with the fact that we, as Christians, were willing to admit that we didn't have all the answers. We still question these things too. Anyway, that conversation turned into an opportunity for me to invite him to Denton North Church, which is meeting for the third time this Sunday. He, and several other students, said they would come! 

My friend Albert, who is a student at TWU, talking to another student

This is me talking with a TWU student!

Please continue to be in prayer for our evangelism efforts and for the students on college campuses in the DFW metroplex. God is doing amazing things in the lives of young people on campus and I am so thrilled to be a part of it! I'll keep you updated on what we're doing next month!

Last week my fellow intern Sarah and I preached our first sermon at our large group meeting for the UNT students. Our topic was centered around our theme of "Break Every Chain." We talked about how to break free from our thoughts about ourselves, others, and our circumstances. Thankfully this sermon was recorded and will hopefully be online very soon! As soon as it's up, I'll be sure to send and/or post the link!

Thank you all so much for your prayers and support. Your help is making a difference in more ways than I can even write in this blog! Much love to you!