Outreach Stories

This Month's Student Testimony

Outreach on Campus

My apprentice, Drew, told me these stories from outreach:

Drew and his wife Darby, who
is also an apprentice this year.

"One week while we were doing Questions on Display a couple of Muslim students came up and started talking to a couple of our students about how Islam and Christianity compare. It was incredibly encouraging, they were so respectful and just wanted to start a dialogue with us. I got the opportunity to talk with a student named Irslan. He had spent a whole year reading through and memorizing the Quran, so he knew his stuff and was very passionate. But he loved that we were doing outreach and starting conversations about religion on campus. I was able to talk to him about Jesus and what his conceptions of Christ were as compared to what Christians think. Overall it was just so encouraging to have an open and friendly dialogue with people who were not yet Christian, but loved to talk about and explore different ideas. Irslan ended up asking me for my number so that we could hang out and talk more later! God is really opening up opportunities to reach out to these Muslim students!"

The team has been doing creative things and the students are coming out in force to share their faith. On the left, some of our team are standing in front of "Questions on Display" where we engage students with spiritual questions. On the right, students are sitting at "Story Time," an event where they told compelling stories (including some of Jesus' parables), and students sat around and discussed after each one.

"This month, all of the UTD apprentices went over to the TWU Dallas campus to put on a Christmas event for the students there. TWU Dallas is typically very different than some of our other campuses. The average age is much higher, there aren't nearly as many students, its confined to basically one building, and there aren't many events that happen on campus. So the fact that we were throwing this event and reaching out to people was already a big shift from what seems like the norm on this campus. The event was simple, we were giving out free hot chocolate, coffee, candy, and cookies. Based on the reaction of the students though, we could have been giving away cars. They were just so blown away that an organization would put on something like that. So many of them shared that our little event made their whole day. Plus, our students had the opportunity to engage in spiritual conversations with them while decorating cookies! It was so encouraging to see how far even a little effort can go to spreading the love of Jesus on campuses like that."

One other cool story is that through these outreach events, a number of our staff and students have connected with members of the atheist club on campus, including some of the leaders. Meaningful friendships have been formed that have resulted in some of them consistently attending our Tuesday night fellowship meeting and also inviting a couple of our staff team to come and speak at their weekly meeting. Please pray for God's blessings on all involved.

Keep FOCUS Growing Fundraiser Thank You!

Our exciting news is that we exceeded our goal for KFG! We blew past our matching funds goal of $29,000 on Giving Tuesday and the students exceeded their matching funds goal of $5000 at our weekly fellowship meetings that week! In all, we are over $75,000 which puts us in a great position moving into the next year. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who gave, shared the posts or otherwise passed on the news, and prayed for us. I was blown away by your generosity!