Perfect love casts out fear

It’s been a really encouraging month ministry wise, I’m excited to tell you about it! God has been doing so much on campus and in our ministry. Thank you so much for helping that happen. I hope that you know how crucial a role you play in what God is up to on campus and that you’re just as much a part of this as anyone else!

I want to highlight a couple different things that we’ve seen happen this last month or so.

The first is that God continues to bring new people into our ministry from all sorts of walks of life. Normally we don’t grow much throughout the year but instead reach most of our new people in the first handful of weeks. That hasn’t been true for this year, every week there seems to be a new face at TNF and our Core groups are actually feeling pretty overwhelmed because their people keep inviting their friends and so the leaders are maxed out on being able to meet up with everyone and give them the attention they need! It’s such a good problem to have, and I love seeing what God is up to in that.

Some of our students serving at a local homeless shelter!

Another thing I keep seeing happen is God seeing our students and staff through different storms we have going on. I think when the Spirit starts doing cool stuff we should also expect difficulty and opposition, and we’ve certainly seen a good share of that as well. A lot of students have lost loved ones, and some of my guys in particular have had grandparents pass away over the last month, have friends in the hospital, have been having hard mental health battles, and one of them is having to reevaluate their living situation and is staying with us for a little while because their roommate had some sort of mental breakdown that has made him unstable and unsafe to be around. We’re glad to be in a place that we can provide a safe place for our student to live for awhile while they sort it out! But overall with all these hard situations what I have seen over and over is that these students have been turning to God (sometimes after some prompting) and in general have drawn closer to God through the hard times that they are experiencing. On that note I’d love to ask for some prayer, it’s been a rougher season for Darby and I trying to manage doing ministry and also having a kid and finding the balance between all of that. So prayers for us to draw near to God and rely on Him would be greatly appreciated!

Eli on his way to TNF!

We just finished up a sermon series covering the topic of fear and what the Bible has to say about it. We themed it around the 1 John 4:18 which says “perfect love casts out fear.” It was so cool to see what Jesus worked in our community through it. I know a lot of my guys had just thought that fear was always going to be there and really hadn’t thought about what Jesus says about it, and so diving into that and letting God work in that area of their life has been so cool to see. We had a longer worship set at the end of the series where people could shout out things they were afraid of and Gods response to that and it was so encouraging hearing from our different students on how they’ve seen God transform their experience with their fears.

We also had a really cool service put on by one of our pastors and some of our students for black history month that was a reflection on the diversity in the body of Christ and of having every tribe nation and tongue present in the church. It was so neat to hear from different students and their experience of seeing God work through their specific ethnic backgrounds. Also we had gospel style worship that was so great and I heard from some of our students of color that it helped them connect to God in a way they hadn’t since being young.

Pizza theology (our semesterly event where we dive deep into a topic for 4 hours) also just wrapped up and we had so many of our Denton students show up! I was given the opportunity to talk about the inspiration of scripture and the dangers of having a simplistic view of that. It was certainly a stretching talk for me to prepare for both in content and also with having a 4 month old around when writing it! But I think God worked through it to minister to our students and hopefully build a good foundation for them to build off of for years to come.

Overall I feel so blessed to be a part of what God continues to do in the lives of these students. I could write pages and pages more about all the ways that I’ve seen Him show up in the last month, but let’s be real nobody has the time for that. What matters is that God really is bringing His kingdom here now!