March blog!

Hi friends and family! Happy Holy Week! I hope you have a great time celebrating Jesus' resurrection with your family!

We had a meeting with the girl student leaders in our ministry last night where we got to reflect on how they have thought about the cross and resurrection in their own life, and how it has impacted them. We also challenged them to keep the sacrifice of Christ as something they think on regularly, and not just around the Easter season. After asking various reflective questions from scripture, we ended with them finding their own scriptures on the cross or resurrection to share as an encouragement. Here is one verse that was shared that I loved: 

Hebrews 9:13-15

"For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant."

Thank you abundantly for your generosity to give so that I can continue sharing the good news of what Jesus did on the cross with so many college students!

                                                                        Stop The Rot: 

We started a new event for our students this spring! Stop the rot is to encourage our student against brain rot from doom scrolling for long periods of time on their phones. The goal is for our students to be on their phones less, so we made bingo cards filled with different ideas for activities they could do that didn't include their phone, like reading a book, make a meal for a friend, make conversation with new people around you, explore a new place you've been wanting to go to, etc. We did two rounds of bingo cards that increased in difficulty as a challenge, and we had them do a screen time challenge during their spring break so that even though they had more time to be on their phone while many of them were back home, some of them took up our challenge to do other things during their time off. After spring break, we ended with a screen free event outside on campus where we had boardgames for our students, various sports to do, line-dancing, and ending in watching the sunset from a rooftop! It was neat having several conversations with people about how they had become more aware of their phone usage and were excited to be working on being more mindful of it! We hope to do the event again next year.

Washington Students outreach week!

SBO stands for Spring Break Outreach and is when our sister ministry in Washington state called CCF (Campus Christian Students) comes down to Texas for a week long mission trip to learn how to do outreach. This is the same ministry that we send our own students to Washington for a leadership conference every May. What's so neat about their trip to Texas is that this is during their own spring break, and instead of taking a trip with their friends, or going home to visit their family, they instead chose to raise money to come and grow their faith through outreach which is not easy! This is our second year getting to host a group of these students, previous years they had gone to our other campuses either UTD or our Collin community colleges. I'm so glad we now get the opportunity to have them come to our campuses! Our staff spends a lot of time in prep to organize their housing situations, meals, and their outreach activities. Having these students come allows our own students to learn what it means to be hospitable and take an interest to get to know new people, and its great to see them love on them so well! The CCF people stay in our different ministry homes that our students live in, and they get to bond with them there in between their days.

It was so fun getting to try out new ways of outreaching to those on campus while the Washington students were here! In the first two photos was my favorite day where we went around the UNT campus to clean people's shoes. This was to model John 13 where Jesus washes the disciples feet. You could tell that it really threw people off who passed by and were surprised we would be willing to do that for them since it is so far from the norm. I got to lead part of their group when we did outreach at TWU. I gave them a tour of the campus since its my alma mater, and we did a paint n sip event where we invited students to come paint mini canvases with us and sip a soda, it was a great event! We also did more conversational evangelism where we had posters of different questions like: "What's a spiritual question that you have?", "What makes a real friend?" "What is your faith background?" etc. to engage people more directly about their faith. 

Something I love about UNT and TWU is that even though not all the students are interested in growing their faith, most people you interact with for outreach are open and willing to talk about it which is super encouraging to me. In Washington where the students came from their campus they told us is very against christians, and they face a majority of negative interactions from people who are much more hostile to the topic. For our large group gathering we do a Texas theme for the Washington students where we have everyone dress up in Texas attire, we give the Washington students bandanas that our students sign their name on, we do Texas Trivia during out announcements, and have a line-dancing event afterward! (Shown in the first few photos). They also have a day for sight-seeing where we take them to the Ft. Worth Stockyards, barbecue spot, and then to Downtown Dallas for Bishop Arts and Trinity Groves, it was such a blessing to have them here with us!

Student Testimony (I mixed up the months): 

Thank you for investing in the vision of college students and being so generous towards me!

Blessings & Peace,

Keanna