Bible study success

One thing we have been excited for this semester is the success of small group bible studies that us and our students have started. There are something like 10 of them (by my head count) that have gotten off the ground so far, but there is just one that I wanted to tell you about.
There are two girls that have recently became involved with us who have a huge heart for the Lord and a passion to see people trust in Christ. They have a small group that is full of freshmen which meets weekly in a dorm on campus, and that group has grown now to 16 girls attending.
This past week after a study on Ephsians ch. 2, where Paul lays our for us our brokenness, and what God has done for us so that we can have a relationship with Him, these two girls invited anyone who hadn't personally recieved Christ, and who had questions about how to do that to stay afterwards and chat. They had 4 girls stay after and pray to recieve Christ into their lives! I also heard there were two others who were seriously considering the true Gospel for the first time. We are so pumped for those 4 girls who have moved from eternal darkness to eternal life, and we are pround of our two students leaders who step out in faith to boldly proclaim the Gospel!

Day at the Lake

Friday afternoon, we took freshman and transfer students out to Lake Nacogdoches to have a great time together, and to get a chance to get to know each other. We were so blessed by friends who shared their beautiful lake house and boat, and another who brought their boat too! The group, around 35 students and staff, had a great time swimming, relaxing on the dock and boats, wakeboarding, and tubing. Then we all came in for a great cookout, and a had the new students get into focus/discussion groups where they talked about life and faith. It was a really fun afternoon and night, and we got a chance to develop awesome relationships with new students who are getting involved in our ministry.

   

Talking Tonight!

My amazing husband is giving the message tonight  at CRU. If you think about it, say a prayer for him, and the students who are going to come and get to hear the Gospel and how they can follow Christ with their life! Thanks friends! 

Have you Heard?

The statistics are staggering, and the truth is heart-breaking.

In a new article from CNN, more and more students are claiming religion, and not having a real and personal relationship with Christ! Please take a minute to read the article, it is worth your time!  Author: More teens becoming 'fake' Christians by John Blake

 

We are so thankful to get to help students to see what having a real relationship with Christ is like! And the challenge them to live a radical life for Christ, not just to buy into the mindset of “God will make me rich and happy.”

Our lives have been changed by the meat and potatoes of Christianity, and we are so happy to serve meat and potatoes rather than cake!!

Thanks for helping! We LOVE seeing students hearts changed for a lifetime of knowing and following Christ!

-Autumn

Bad Day Turns Amazing!

Hey, its Autumn! I was headed up to campus last week, and honestly I was kind of in a bad mood. I was supposed to be meeting with a new girl to share with her more info about CRU and how to have a personal relationship with Christ, and for various reasons she was not able to make it. I was heading up to Starbucks on campus to try and meet her, and she was not able to come. But as I walked up to the cafe, this is what I saw…

This may not look like anything to you, but allow me to explain! These two guys from out leadership team were hanging out on campus in their free time, trying to get into conversations with students and to share the Gospel with them! Unprompted! A little while back we shared with you about a cool tool that we use to get into spiritual conversations with people called Soularium. To read more about it, check out our previous post, or the Soularium website.

The thing that turned my day around was students desiring to share the Gospel with their peers, and strangers on campus!

In fact, I sat and talked with one of our students, and while we talked for a minute, he politely interrupted so that he could ask 3 students walking by if they wanted to take the survey, and after the survey if they wanted to know how to have a personal relationship with Christ, and the 3 students wanted to hear the Gospel, and praise the Lord they heard! And not only did they share with the 3 students I witnessed, they had shared with another 5 students earlier in the day!

It is so fantastic to see students get it! Students investing in students for eternity!

Praise the Lord!

Semester is on its way!

This semester has started off great. Autumn and I seem to hardly have any time to take a break and catch our breath, so we are excited for having nothing tying us down this weekend. I just wanted to hop on here and share about how much we've seen the Lord work this past week and a half on campus.
As I mentioned in the previous blog we had recieved a ton of contact cards from random events. I don't have the exact count but between Autumn and I, I would say that we had atleast 45-50 appointments with some of those students in the last week or so, and thats not counting the appointments our staff team and students had. Just to paint the picture of what I mean when I say appointment...it goes like this...
We set up the appt for 20-30 minutes with a student, spend some time getting to know them and hear about thier life. Share with them about Cru, and turn the conversation into a spiritual one. Then through a couple different questions that I ask everyone I meet with ( "0%-100% how sure are you that you would go to heaven if you died today?" and..."so now your standing before God, and He asks you "why should I let you into Heaven"...what do you say?"). Based on the answer, which is depressingly almost always wrong, we then share the Gospel with them using some great tools, and give them the opportunity to place thier faith in Christ, or maybe help them understand what they say they already believe.
It's just been a great start to the year, by my head count I'd say us, our students, and staff have probably shared the Gospel with over 250 people, including the SFA Cru record 95 people we saw at our first meeting. We have also seen 8 people pray on the spot to receive Christ and had numerous others leave seriously considering the Gospel.
Great start, and we are excited to see what God will do with the uncoming weeks. Hopefully we can get a more detailed update soon, but I thought I'd just do that scatter shot for now!

Welcome Week!

Starting last Thursday at 10 am was the crazy awkwardness of freshmen moving into SFA for their first time. Statistics show that in the first 6 weeks of school %80 of freshmen will be open to hearing that Gospel, after those 6 weeks the percentage drop dramatically so that by the end of the school year only 20% are open to hearing the Gospel. Is God bigger than these stats? Oh yeah. Should still still plan according to the info we have? Definitely.

So, when hundreds of freshmen roll up on the first day possible we are there to say hi, and give them a helping hand. It is a great time for us because our existing students show up with servants hearts, knowing that they are going to be helping a students hoping to start a relationship where we can share with them about Jesus. Move in went great, we met some sharp students who we were able to invite to the rest of our welcome week events.

That Thursday night we had our first actual event. We called it Cru Coffeehouse. We set up tables in the middle of campus and 9pm that night, and the girls did a great job of creating a coffee ambience feeling. Starbucks donated to us some very delicious and very free coffee which we handed out to the mostly freshmen students who came to hang out.

As with every event we do, we have every students fill out what we call a “contact card”, or basically a survey, in order to participate in whatever is happening. The survey is their contact info and two questions; “Would you like more info about Campus Crusade?”, and “Would you like more info about how to have a personal relationship with God?”. If they say yes to either, then we have a golden ticket to get together with them, get to know them, and give them an opportunity to respond to the Gospel.

Cru Coffeehouse was a great success. It was first night for students to move in, class didn’t start til Monday, and we got 65 contacts to share the Gospel with.

Friday night we piggybacked some other events going on that night on campus, and set up a place for students to get some free ice cream. We are really creative and called it…”Free Ice Cream". God uses this stuff to bring people from eternal darkness to eternal light….amazing. 75+ contacts easily.

Saturday night we tried something new. We had SFA Longest Game of Knockout, in the rec center. Knock out is a basketball game where you shoot from the free throw line and try to get the person out in front of you. To be honest, it wasn’t as big as we thought, but still had 40 people show up. 40 contact cards.

 

Sunday we were a part of multiple groups who hosted a BBQ in the middle of Campus, no contact cards allowed for us, but a great to to meet and connect with incoming students.

Monday morning, first day of class, the campus is hopping and busy. We set up a station and handed out Freshmen Survival Kits (FSK’s) for contact cards. An FSK is a laundry bag with a Bible, bottle, and a flyer in it. Freshmen love it. We handed out 250 FSK’s. AKA 250 more people to share the Gospel with.

So you do the math that's a lot of people. We spread out the cards to staff and students and began to set up tons of appt for this week. I’m going to let Autumn tell you how our first day of appts turned our but just as a teaser it rhymes with “swirls crusting in sliced”…yes I’m aware that's not even a sentence

Roundtable meeting.

Well summer is officially over and school has cranked back up here in Nac. We have been sooo busy since we started staff meeting a week and a half ago.

It has been three years since we have been on campus for the beginning of the fall, which was the first fall semester after Autumn and I were married. The Lord has brought us through, and provided for us so much in the last 2 years to have us on campus for this semester, and we are so thrilled and blessed to be here.

We kicked off the year last Tuesday  with a meeting with all of our leadership students, for which we call the “Roundtable”.  It was a very productive meeting which resulted in everyone leaving pumped for what God would do through us this year.

We talked extensively on being outward focused as one of our goals for the year. We planned discipleship for our students, and committed to setting aside our social schedules to pour into the freshmen, and go beyond just making the new student feel wanted, and to making them accepted and caring for them.

We also talked about how we could best serve the students involved with us and how we wanted to operate as if we flipped the traditional business model (the boss is in charge of managers who are in charge of employees who are in charge of others employees etc…). We wanted to make sure that us are staff aren’t their boss, and that they don’t feel like they are better, or in charge of the rest of Cru, rather that us as staff are at the bottom serving and enabling our leadership students to server and enable the students in Cru to reach their peers for Christ.

We also planned Bible Studies for we we are starting our with 7 on campus studies, which is very exciting! I don’t remember having this many trying to be started ever.

Great meeting, but when Thursday finally came around the talking stopped and it was time to get to work!…