New Opportunities

Hello!

It seems like this spring has been a time of a lot of new initiatives in our ministry. Our students and staff have been starting up a bunch of different things that have been really exciting for me to see. It is dangerous for a ministry, church or organization to become stagnant. It’s very tempting to just keep doing the same old thing. While there are plenty of things that as followers of God we are called to be faithful in, we are also called to be creative and branch out. I’ve loved seeing how the Lord has been leading us to do that, so this month I wanted to highlight some of those things that are happening in our ministry!

Some of the things we have going on:

We had the opportunity to host one of the BLOOM events at our house, it was super fun! 

BLOOM

Some of the students of color in FOCUS have decided to come together to create BLOOM which stands for Black Lights of Our Ministry. Their goal is to provide opportunities for people of color to come together and share their culture and experience both with each other and also with our whole ministry. It has been an avenue for our black students to find solidarity with one another, but also, they have been such a blessing to our larger community as well. They put on multiple events during black history month, including cookouts, worship nights, and outreach times. Overall, this has been one of my favorite things I’ve seen our students do in recent times. It’s so cool to see our students take initiative like this and come together to build each other and the larger community up.

Discipleship Class

This is something that FOCUS did years ago that our staff decided to revive this Spring. Once a week we are putting on a 1.5hr long class on different topics of discipleship. This month we’ve been focusing on Christian history and how we can learn from the past 2000 years of church history to better understand our current context. I taught the first class which was about how scripture reading has changed over the course of the last 2000 years, starting with the canonization of the Bible, up through the church fathers, the reformation and to the modern day. We had about 20 students show up to this which is really amazing! It’s hard for some students to wake up and go to classes they have to do for school, much less for them to come to a class to learn about Christian history. So, I’m excited to see our students catching a vision for becoming life-long learners for Christ.

Our Daily Bread Volunteering

There is an organization up in Denton that ministers to the homeless population of our city called Our Daily Bread. They finally opened up their new building and made more streamlined ways to volunteer, and so our community has started to volunteer more regularly at their center for the homeless population in Denton. Our students are really excited and eager to serve in this way, and I’m hopeful that this will continue and build into being a staple of our community.

NCTC Startup

We’re finally getting started at North Central Texas College up in Denton! It’s been a long time coming as getting planted at a community college has only become increasingly hard in recent years. But God is making a path forward for us at NCTC and I look forward to seeing what He does on this new campus!

Overall, I feel quite encouraged this month, who knows where a lot of these initiatives will end up, but I’m sure that God will use them to grow us and hopefully to push forward His Kingdom.

One last thing, you probably already received an email about this, but the Department of Education plans to remove regulations that specifically protect student organizations like FOCUS soon. We have a chance to make a comment on the page they have set up in order to either have them reverse this decision or provide groundwork for the future. For more information on this you can go to https://anyfocus.org/campusaccess/ which has more specifics on what is going on, why it matters, and also what you can do to help. If you’re able, I ask that you take 10mins to go leave a comment because it could make a big difference for protecting our religious freedoms on campus!