Each year, the staff take all of the returning student leaders on a retreat to prepare for the coming school year. We call this retreat "Mustard Seed" because our hope is that we start the year small and then grow into somethign big and beautiful. This year, Kristen and I traveled two hours south to a beautiful house on the North Umpqua River. We were there with our two student leaders; Mike, a senoir who traveled to Cairo with us, and Kit, a 1st year leader and a sophomore. The four of us got caught up on our summers and began to vision for what the year could be. We studied the story of Gideon because it felt very appropriate for our situation. Gideon was up against huge odds and only had a tiny little army to do it. OSU is a campus of over 20,000 students and there are only four people on the leadership team in InterVarsity. The message of Gideon was clear: God does not care how big or small we are to start the year, because it is him who does the work. We just need to be faithful to obey.
We also spent a lot of time playing cards games, most of which I won! HA HA! And watched an episode of my favorite TV show, LOST, as a lesson in what it means to be a leader. Coming back from the retreat, we all felt much more prepared to go into the dorms and meet the new freshman class.
Students moved in the next day and we began running around meeting as many people as we could. Mike and I are in Finely Hall, while Kristen and Kit are in Sackett Hall. I must say, I have had a blast for the last two weeks. I have met a lot of students and I really feel like Mike and I are creating a fun community in the dorm. These relationships we have been building will hopefully create a lot of really great opportunities to share the gospel. Let me give you a list of the things we have been doing during our 12-15 hour days of welcome week:
Going floor by floor and knocking on every door to meet people.
Playing a heck of a lot of Ping Pong. There are a bunch of great ping pong players in my hall!
Lots of video games.
We took some students to help out at a local food bank. See the picture.
Eating Meals with people
Bowling, Dodgeball, frisbee, hackey sack and anything else people want to do.
Board Games.
An ice cream social
We have met a lot of people, but I still feel like I haven't met 2/3 of the people living there. But that is ok because I have a lot of time to meet everyone else!
This was all leading up to a big outreach event we did last night in Finley. It was called "Sexy Pizza" and was a Q&A discussion about Jesus and sex. I lead it and it went really well. Students were encouraged to write down questions they had and then we had a discussion about it. About 55 students (most of whom were non-christians) showed up and stayed for the discussion and there were about 30 more who stopped by but didn't stay. I shared about how Jesus does not condemn us for our sexual sin but also calls us into new life. I think it will be very fun to talk to people about what they thought of the event.
Please be praying for this ministry. There is so much potential right now. This is probably the most fun I have had during New Student Outreach. We will be starting Bible Study and Large Group Worship next week and have hopes that there will be a lot of new students who want to get involved. In two weeks we will be hosting a large outreach event that will focus on Jesus, justice and Poverty. we hope to attract a lot of people and present the Gospel to them there. God is really doing a lot here and I can't wait to see what happens this year!
