Fall Retreat This Weekend

We have been preparing for our fall retreat this week. We will be spending this Saturday in Framingham at a beautiful retreat center on 113 acres. The students are looking forward to getting out of the city.

We have a handful of new students coming with us this weekend which is wonderful. We will get a chance to really get to know them and they will be able to fully experience Chi Alpha.

Our speaker is Rob Malcolm. He and his wife Sarah are planting a campus ministry at Yale. They just arrived in the Northeast in August. Rob is from Scotland and he will be teaching about faith and doubt by using Abraham and Isaac as his main characters.

Please be in prayer for us. Pray that we would have many unexpected, last minute registrations at our first meeting for the retreat on Friday. Pray that God would speak to the heart of everyone there and that we would have a rich time of fellowship together.

I will try to give you an update at the retreat to let you know how it is going. Gene and I will also tweet from the retreat. You can follow us on Twitter.

Thank you so much for your prayers.

Family Ties That Choke

I just spent an hour sharing with two women in the GSU. I am making a point to take out our women leaders - Jessica and Hellen - to do evangelism on campus. Jessica and I just approached two women and had good conversations with them about God.

One woman is a very strong Jew. She comes from a very strong, practicing Jewish family, but she has adapted her Jewish faith to fit her lifestyle here at college.

The second woman is an international student and a very strong Hindu from Bombay and whose parents now live in Singapore. Jessica happened to know her so she has an open door with her to talk again. She had accommodated her Hinduism to her modern lifestyle, also.

I knew, as I was talking to both these women, that I would not have chance to share in depth about Jesus, but I was able to integrate a few statements of Truth into the conversations as I went. Jessica loved the experience and wants to go out again.

One thing that struck me about both women was the strong ties to family through their religion. Neither would even think about converting to another religion because of the relationship they have with their parents. They were born into their faith, their parents had brought them up in their faith and both women felt deep obligation to their origins. Neither had a negative feeling about this, but both wanted to be true to how they had been brought up.

It is heart breaking how the Enemy has twisted the family to keep people trapped. In the case of these two women, Jesus would set father and mother against daughter Matthew 10:34-39, and make it very difficult for them to make a commitment to Jesus. Jessica and I will continue to pray for both these ladies.

First Day Back At The Office

I am sitting in the GSU Backcourt meeting with students. This is my office on campus and it is good to be back on campus working.

Our first two weeks have gone well. We won't know until two or three weeks from now how many new students we will have in our group. It takes that long for freshmen to decide which group on campus they will attend and our cores are just forming this week.

We had twelve new students the first meeting of the year and twelve different new students the second meeting of the year. This week Gene will be covering the topic "The Problem of Pain". We are hoping that topic will attraction some attention and get students involved in asking questions and making comments in our Tuesday night meeting.

The women's core meets for the first time this Thursday and I will find out then if I am leading a core this year. If there is an over flow I will be taking a small group. It would be a nice problem to have.

Keep praying for our outreach to men. We haven't had any new men visit our group. We are not happy about that, even though we have met many men and are being intentional about reaching out to them.

Our next major event will be our retreat Sept 30 - Oct 1. Please pray that we have at least 20 students come and that we receive the money we need for it from the university. We have a speaker - Rob and Sarah Malcolm. They are the new Chi Alpaha pastors at Yale. We will be going out to Framingham, just outside of Boston to a beautiful retreat center there. By then the leaves will be bright with color and the countryside will be beautiful.

First Week Adventures

I just spent 28 hours in our car returning from Savannah, Georgia after leaving Laura off for college. Savannah is a wonderful town and the College of Art and Design (SCAD) is a great school. She is going to have a blast going to school there.  Leaving her off made me think about how she is at the beginning of an incredible adventure in her life. She can be anyone, learn anything and do what ever she wants in these next few years.

Every new student I meet in these next four weeks, here at BU, is beginning the same adventure. I pray that they choose to make God the most important person in their life during their college years. Pray with me for that same thing.

Our first week went very well. We had twelve new students at our first meeting last week. We are expecting more tomorrow night. Last Tuesday was the first day of school and it was crazy raining that evening. More will come out tomorrow.

I have started making appointments with a few freshmen I met this last week and we have our first student officer meeting tonight. Thursday will be a dorm talk style presentation on Faith & Science in the GSU. Pray students attend. I'll have more to report later in the week.

Great Day @ Splash!

Here we are at the end of Splash after greeting 3000 freshmen and talking to 77 new students. We had a great day so we are all tired, but excited. This was a new group of returning students and none of them had done Splash before. 77 names is a lot for a group of rookies!

I met freshmen from all over the US - California, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Washington. and from Korea, Japan and even Mongolia! BU has over 4000 international students - one of the highest numbers among private schools in the country. We pray each year that international students would join us.

I spent the evening putting all the emails onto our follow up list. Now begins the task of contacting each student personally and getting together with them. Our students will do most of that.

At the very end of our time at Splash we were in a circle praying for the day and two preChristians came up to talk to me. I invited them to join our circle and they prayed with us. Then Thomas and I had a long discussion with them about Christianity addressing a number of their questions. They were very interested and I think they may end up coming on Tuesday.

Our next event is the Religious Life Fair on Tuesday just before our first meeting that night. Please pray that we get even more names that day and that every student we met at Splash and that day, will come to our first meeting and they would like what they see and experience, and commit to joining us. Thank you so much for your prayers.