Wash U Christian Fellowship is a community of Jesus followers free to love God and to make His love known at Wash U. That's the vision that I have been sharing with the students I am meeting. There is something in particular about the public nature of making God's love known to others that presents the challenge for students to choose faith instead of fear. I continue to hear that invitation for myself as well and so I've been experimenting with some creative ways to engage students in conversations about spiritual reality. This kind of public outreach has been helpful because it's a tangible way to invite students to join me in mission on campus and it allows me to gauge their openness to risk-taking.
The week after Fall Conference I planned to run a Proxé Station for two afternoons on campus as a way to publicly invite students to consider the God who loves them. A Proxé Station is an interactive experience used to clearly explain the Gospel and help people to respond appropriately. The Proxé Station that I decided to use involved asking students to respond to questions about how they have been both victims and perpetrators of injustice. I had a few solid conversations with students who stopped by the display on the first day, but I left campus feeling tired and lonely. The thought of trying it again the next day just felt daunting.
I called my supervisor that evening and as I shared how tiring and lonely my experience of the day had been she offered to join me at the Proxé Station for an hour the following day along with one of our other teammates. Esther, my friend and staff with Asian Christian Fellowship (ACF), was able to join us as well. If having three staff partners with me wasn't enough, two students from Wash U Christian Fellowship's sister chapters, ACF and Harambee, ran the station with me for the second half of the afternoon and changed their plans at the last minute in order to do so. Together we were able to engage so many more students in conversation than the first day and many conversations revealed the spiritual hunger that exists among students at Wash U.
Isn't God's provision incredibly timely?
That same day I received a call from Howie with the idea to bring a team of staff to Wash U to run multiple Proxé Stations on campus on November 2 as part of their evangelism training. Pray for open hearts and minds next Tuesday as we confront students with the evil of human trafficking, invite them to consider the things that they are enslaved by in the process, and point them toward Jesus as the one who brings freedom.
The week after Fall Conference I planned to run a Proxé Station for two afternoons on campus as a way to publicly invite students to consider the God who loves them. A Proxé Station is an interactive experience used to clearly explain the Gospel and help people to respond appropriately. The Proxé Station that I decided to use involved asking students to respond to questions about how they have been both victims and perpetrators of injustice. I had a few solid conversations with students who stopped by the display on the first day, but I left campus feeling tired and lonely. The thought of trying it again the next day just felt daunting.
I called my supervisor that evening and as I shared how tiring and lonely my experience of the day had been she offered to join me at the Proxé Station for an hour the following day along with one of our other teammates. Esther, my friend and staff with Asian Christian Fellowship (ACF), was able to join us as well. If having three staff partners with me wasn't enough, two students from Wash U Christian Fellowship's sister chapters, ACF and Harambee, ran the station with me for the second half of the afternoon and changed their plans at the last minute in order to do so. Together we were able to engage so many more students in conversation than the first day and many conversations revealed the spiritual hunger that exists among students at Wash U.
Isn't God's provision incredibly timely?
That same day I received a call from Howie with the idea to bring a team of staff to Wash U to run multiple Proxé Stations on campus on November 2 as part of their evangelism training. Pray for open hearts and minds next Tuesday as we confront students with the evil of human trafficking, invite them to consider the things that they are enslaved by in the process, and point them toward Jesus as the one who brings freedom.
Partnering with friends from Asian Christian Fellowship to
start conversations about Jesus and social justice.
start conversations about Jesus and social justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment