August blog!

Hi friends and family! I hope you're doing well and that you had a great month of August! This is our busiest and most exciting season of ministry since all of the students have come back to campus, or come for the very first time! The Lord has been at work in many ways seen in the openness of so many students who are interested to know more about community and about Jesus! Praise God!

Fall staff retreat!

Every year before we go out onto our separate campuses, we spend time with our staff team together getting spiritually refreshed and ready to pour out onto our students! This was my third year getting to do this, and it is such a gift getting to connect with my coworkers in this way, and not just do a job together, but be on mission with one another, and be reminded about our goals as a ministry.

Corefa retreat!

The past few years we have put on a 24hr retreat for our student leaders after a week long of events and evangelism to meet students on campus. This is a time for our students to feel rested through personal time with God, with others, and begin to start bonding with one another since have about a 50 person team of student leaders, and many of them who are doing it for the first time, so we really want them to connect with one another to be a support to each other in the year ahead!

In this photo, we have our TWU student leaders this year and our staff women who will be leading them!

One of the best parts of corefa retreat is getting to reconnect with everyone since its been a whole summer since seeing many of them! Another neat thing is getting to see the girls I studied the bible with and mentored say yes to a leadership role! This is the case for Shaela to the right of me!

One of the times of worship at the retreat!

We started the retreat with a time of group games that I got to lead. This is not something we do much of in our ministry, but its something new that we did at our staff retreat, and allowed for people to be light-hearted with one another. These types of group games were intentional about them getting to learn things about one another personally, and learn each others story of following Jesus which is so sweet to witness!

Something I'm looking most forward to this year is getting to lead a peer team for the first time! Peer team is like a small group, but for our student leaders. Each week this year, I will meet with a pair of these girls in the photo. We will go over scripture some weeks, challenging articles/readings some weeks, and a majority of helping them learn how to navigate different parts of their ministry that they do for girls in their small group, and in meeting one on one studying the bible with girls in their small group. I'm so looking forward to getting to do a new aspect of ministry that is surrounded around one of our biggest ministry models which is growing and developing Godly leaders.

First TNF (Thursday Night Fellowship) of the year!

This is when our whole ministry at both UNT and TWU come together every week on campus at UNT for a fellowship gathering with worship, a sermon, and fun after activities for them to meet new people. This was our kickoff meeting for the year and we had a great turnout of old and many new students who have gotten connected to our ministry!

The Kickback!

I got the neat opportunity to put on our very first black student event in our ministry!

This is something our other FOCUS campuses at UTD and Richland college have done before, and we got to do it as well. This was so special to be apart of! I had several students help me with this event, and I deeply appreciated it! We had food and fellowship, did a bingo card activity where students went around the room with a sheet of paper that had various conversation starters on them to meet new people and relate on shared experiences from growing up in a black culture. We had different board games that we did as well that were centered around a black upbringing, and we ended the night with line dancing! It was a really fun and joyful experience! I am so thankful to get to be in a ministry that has grown so much in diversity! I'm honored to be able to put events like this on so that our students can feel known and have a sense of belonging!

Baptisms!

After church a few weekends back, we had two of our student leaders get baptized! Laniah and Miles. Laniah is in my peer team this year, so I will get the blessing of meeting with her all year and getting to know her better. She recently transferred from Richland college where we also have FOCUS and her previous campus pastors got to come support her and baptize her! Miles joined our ministry last year, and has been a great example of faith for the guys in our ministry!

Laniah & I after her baptism!

Welcome week events!

Welcome weeks are the few weeks at the beginning of the school year where both UNT & TWU are putting on events at the University for students to get connected this is for all the freshmen and returning students. Our ministries role during these weeks is to put on other events throughout the day at the times that students are free and open to coming and learning about us! We do a range of sports like activities, tabling where we hand out different goodies for them to have, craft events, worship night, and we even put on brand new events this year like a glow in the dark hangout, cultural foods and dancing, and mini campfire concert!

The photo above is one of our bigger events which is our multicultural worship night! This is my favorite event we got to do because it shows how much our ministry cares about kingdom diversity! We sang songs in spanish and had different people come up to explain its importance to them growing up, and we had students volunteer to share the Lord's prayer in different languages, there were even languages and dialects I had never heard which was so special!