Thinking Ahead to New Leadership

Well it's summer, and that means lots of conversations are happening with young men and women about stepping up to lead a Core in the coming year. It's a big commitment, probably 12-15 hours a week, but we never have trouble finding students to serve. They work with a partner to meet new students, recruit their own small group, plan a weekly meeting, develop their group into a community of spiritual friends, wrangle them into our larger community, and offer a one-on-one discipleship experience to each member. Some of them are doing all of this at 19 years old! It's no wonder they grow so much! It makes me excited for the future of the Church, knowing that we are sending out skilled and experienced leaders into so many different churches, workplaces, homes, and other environments. At UTD, we already have 23 guys who have committed for the year, and another 6 that are still prayerfully considering. Please pray that God will prepare these young men (and their counterparts among the women) for the opportunities ahead and that He will be preparing the hearts and minds of the students they will meet in August. I'm confident that divine appointments are already being booked!

I recently read a very compelling reflection on Luke 5:36-39. (You can read it here)

He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”

The author posits that we have missed the point of this teaching of Jesus because we haven't paid attention to its context, a meal at a tax collector's house and questions surrounding the differences between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of the Pharisees. What if this is not a comment about the old and new covenants of the scripture but rather commentary on why Jesus did not choose his disciples from among the best and brightest religious minds of his day? I won't recount the whole argument, but it has me thinking about what Jesus was looking for in those he "called to be with him" so he could "send them out to preach" (Mark 3:14). 

Jesus didn't play it safe, taking the ones who already knew the right answers. He didn't pick apathetic men and women, but rather passionate ones--sons of thunder who wanted to call down fire from heaven on people who wouldn't listen, a zealot who wanted to overthrow Rome with violence, people who wore their questions and even lack of faith on their sleeve. He included a betrayer, a denier and a woman who had been demon possessed.  He was doing something new, and he wanted people he could shape, who were eager to receive his message and adapt to it. 

Choosing these core leaders is not as significant of a decision, but it is significant. They are sent out two by two as well. They do not know what they will encounter, but there are still sick to be healed, truths to be preached, and demonic forces to be encountered. These young disciples are just as raw; they struggle with big questions, deep hurts, and very real temptations. But like those original disciples, they show up and step up, facing their fears and making sacrifices for the chance to be a part of whatever Jesus is doing. And like Jesus, we try to prayerfully and discerningly give them a chance to be a part of something amazing. 

Last night I sat with one of those young leaders from last year as he tearfully talked about a painful relationship with a deeply hurting guy he has built a friendship with. "Why me?" he told me he'd been asking God. Why? Because it's important work, Spirit-work. Every year we see our axiom come true: "Your misery can become your ministry." I get to build deep friendships with and mentor young men of all races and from across the globe. I get to sit and hear their heartbreaking and deeply private stories of abuse and personal failure; I get to celebrate with them their victories and triumphs. Why me? I guess because when I got the invitation I said yes. And now I get to extend that invitation to a new generation in my little corner of God's kingdom. It's one of my favorite parts of campus ministry. We never know what God will do next!

Some Big Staff Transitions

This is more for those of you who know a lot of the staff. Feel free to skip this section if these names don't mean anything to you! 

For a campus ministry, our staff team is amazingly stable over the years. Even yesterday I had a director from another ministry at UTD asking for insight on how to make this a viable long-term option for his staff so he doesn't lose them just as they gain some experience and wisdom! But transitions do happen, and God is so faithful to us through those transition periods. This year we had some long-term staff members transition off the team to new opportunities. Leah Lorenz (one of the founders at UTD!), Victoria Seiler, and Casey Worsham all transitioned off of our admin staff. Leah and Victoria will be spending more time with their kids, and Casey is stepping up to full-time hours as lead pastor of East Plano Fellowship, the church he helped start in 2020. We are sad to lose them, but I can very confidently say that they each left us in a significantly better place than when they started. They set up systems, refined processes, resourced creative solutions, and built key relationships. As a result, we are going into the coming year with a significantly leaner admin team (both in people and overall staff hours) supporting a bigger ministry than every before (a lot of that is also due to our amazing admin director Paul Ueng). 

On the campus side, after a time of prayer and discernment, Jalen Quintana (one of our UTD alums) has left our UTA staff after a few years to pursue opportunities in software engineering. He has been such a huge help over the years in laying the foundation for our ministry in Arlington (as well as a great friend to my wife!). Rhett Hayes is leaving UTD after 5 years to take Jalen's place in Arlington and lay groundwork for a TCU plant in the future. While we are losing Rhett, we are getting Laurence Glenesk back! Laurence worked on our team for years but then left to pioneer a ministry at SMU. The SMU ministry is stronger than ever, but Laurence is looking to work closer to home now that he has two little ones, and we are excited to have him back on our team! Garrett Davis will be overseeing the SMU ministry moving forward. 

Student Testimony

I Graduated!

I think I'm done with degrees. I know I'm done with footnotes! I finished my coursework back in December, but I (and Peter along with me) finally walked across the stage on June 10 in Pasadena, CA, where Fuller Theological Seminary is located. It was a very special and spiritual ceremony, and I was moved to tears when we sang "I Give Myself Away" in the middle of it. I was moved to a different kind of tears sitting through 400 names being read, but at least it's over!

I couldn't believe how many people got to come to our graduation so far from where any of us live. It was such a blessing to me! A number of people from the FOCUS staff, my wife and parents, and Peter's entire family got to be there. The special thing Peter did to get that red stole hanging down was just being Asian American. But the special thing he did to get the red hood (around his neck) instead of my white one was taking 50% more classes than me!

I've been reflecting on seminary and its value and place in campus ministry. Because campus ministers typically come straight from the secular university (for example, I have bachelors and masters degrees in business from UTD), relatively few have a seminary education and almost none start their ministry with one. A big part of going to seminary for me was answering my questions about it. I have a couple of initial reflections.

1. There's incredible value in studying slowly while actively being a minister. I thought I would not like online school as much, but what was unexpected was that, rather than sitting in a classroom with a bunch of full-time students, I was actively learning alongside a bunch of full-time ministers. We were trying to figure out how to use what we were learning realtime. I got to be in classes with church pastors, other campus ministers, missionaries, chaplains to various hospitals and prisons, Salvation Army officers, youth ministers, and more. They brought a richness to what I was being taught, but so did talking it over with the university students and alumni I get to meet with every day! I loved taking this degree one or two classes at a time, slowly pondering and integrating what I was learning. 

2. What we've been doing in FOCUS all along for education is REALLY GOOD. We've long had a commitment to continuing education for our pastoral staff. We are always reading, listening to lectures, or otherwise pursuing deeper understanding of the scriptures and ministry leadership. Our staff reads multiple books together each year, and our commitment is to graduate level learning. We believe that if we are to lead university students, we should be operating at their level or above. Fuller has expanded our list of resources and given us new topics to explore, but I believe anyone on our team for a few years will ultimately come out ahead of someone with a one-and-done seminary education before they start their ministry career.

I am soooooo thankful for this education, and I assure you I'm using it every day. Through your gifts, the ministry helped pay for it and gave me the time to devote to it. It has raised my game in teaching and leadership, and I'm passing that on to these younger pastors that I mentor. I've gotten to do things I never thought I'd get to do, like make my own translations of scriptures from the Greek and Hebrew! I know it will take a few more years for all of this learning to sort of settle in my heart and mind, but I'm committed to blessing our mission what what has been invested in me. So thank you!!

SICM!

SICM was a huge success, as usual. We are busy meeting up with all these wonderful students and talking to them about making a commitment to serve and lead their peers next year. The future is looking bright!

This is the group we took to SICM from FOCUS this May. The crazy thing is that it doesn't include about 5 people who were not there at the moment and another 5 we sent in June!

This is the group of guys Peter and I hosted (minus one) at a house in Bellingham all week. They are all UTD guys--a really neat bunch!

Student Testimony

Stories from the Year

Last Friday night we had our last FNF, which is always one of my favorite nights of the year. Instead of a teaching time, we open up the mic for students to share about how they've seen God working this year. The stories are so sweet! Here's the prompt we use:

We always cover the "ABCs of Sharing" to help make the time as meaningful as possible.

You would have been so encouraged to hear the students sharing on Friday night, but you still can be! Just click here to listen students share about the impact the Lord has made in their lives through your prayers and generosity!

In other news, I joined in this year's Parking Lot Graduation ceremony to celebrate my new seminary degree!

Since I was walking, Rhett handed out the "diplomas," which are actually a letter of blessing and sending from our pastors to the graduates.

We had 43 graduates this year from UTD alone!

Student Testimony

Thank you for loving young people into God's kingdom!

Links from Last Time

I realized that when the email when out, it didn't have the links for any of those videos or audio! I got too fancy in making my blog. You can always click through the email to get to those things if that happens again. I'll also include them again here. (Hopefully it works this time. If not, I'll have to call IT. :)

Here's the audio from our Pizza Theology on Wisdom, linked on Spotify:

Here's the senior epistle from Kim:

And here's one from Jared:

And as a bonus, here's a pic of me and my UTD directors team when we all wore pink for Easter Sunday!

Wisdom for Dummies

Over the weekend I got to do part of the teaching for our Spring Pizza Theology entitled Wisdom for Dummies. Three of our younger pastors helped us look at the messages of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and then I finished by looking at the idea of wisdom more generally. Prepping for this message was especially meaningful as I got to spend a significant amount of time quizzing Ronnie Worsham and Brady Bobbink for their insights. It was a great night of teaching attended by hundreds of our students. It's well worth a listen if you want to take the time!

I received an incredibly encouraging email from an alumnus the other day that reminded me of the importance of teaching times like this--how formative they are to young people learning to think like a Christian. Here's an excerpt:

I was listening to a podcast I subscribe to that’s based in the Dallas area. They were talking about a church down there that hosted a worship night and then the pastor started preaching for full acceptance and support of the homosexual lifestyle, basically saying it’s blasphemous to separate two people in love. My podcast was discussing the importance of being able to think and reason through scripture so we’re not led astray by false teachings.

Immediately I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the solid foundation I gained upon coming to faith in FOCUS. The biblical literacy I learned, let alone the ability to create family culture and disciple others, while there has greatly impacted the trajectory of my life. For that I am profoundly grateful.

Thank you for supporting this important kind of ministry. The church (not to mention the world!) needs more men and women who are equipped and experienced at thinking biblically, carefully, and deeply about the tough challenges that face us. That's slow work, but it pays off over the long run!

Senior Epistles

Every year we let our graduating seniors at UTD write and read letters to our community in the last weeks of the school year. They are so encouraging! I wanted to share a couple with you here. I think you'll see how much your support impacts young people and how much wisdom they have gained in these years!

Student Testimony

Help Protect Our Mission in 8 Minutes or Less!

The US Department of Education has recently announced plans to remove existing protections for religious student organizations at colleges and universities across the nation. Their reasoning is that these rights are already protected under the Constitution, so students can take their colleges to court if these rights are infringed upon.

However, most 18-year-olds are pretty unaware of their rights and have neither the desire nor the resources to sue their own college. And we've seen that before the existing language was put in a place a few years ago, universities were inconsistent in how they protected or did not acknowledge these rights.

Would you be willing to take 5-8 minutes to write a personal comment on this proposed change before March 24 (the deadline for comments)?

We've put together a website that will show you exactly how to do it and give you some ideas of things you might say. It does not need to be long, but ideally it would be personal and highlight one of more reasons why the DOE should give colleges guidance in protecting the 1st Amendment rights of students.

We want to generate hundreds of comments from our network alone!

Here's the website that explains everything: anyfocus.org/campusaccess

(one quick note: when it asks you "What is your comment about?", that's just a weird way of asking what category you are in. You will most likely put student, parent, or individual.)

Thank you!

Encouraging Posts

 A couple weeks back, one of our student leaders shared these screenshots from a Facebook group for UTD Parents that her mom is a member of. These are in response to parents worrying about their kids being lonely and not finding good friends. I found them so encouraging!

And then this was posted on Instagram by a new student in Denton. This is the vision guys! Thanks for being a part of it!

Funny Videos

I meant to share these last month. Our staff always makes a funny video for the opening of our big Winter Retreat. This year the joke was all around inflation and our pastors trying to make some extra money. (It's in 2 parts, but only a few minutes total.)

Checking up on Focus on Jesus studies

In February each year we pause to take stock of the FOJ studies we've started that year. At UTD we have completed 17 studies (completing is always a miracle haha), have 95 studies that are currently happening, and another 12 studies that began and have stopped for some reason. That's 124 students that have been receiving weekly one-on-one instruction and discussion about how the gospel intersects with their lives, usually in addition to discussions in Core and biblical teaching on Friday nights. It also means so many of our students are the ones teaching those studies! They are getting real experience ministering to their peers and sharing the good news of Jesus!

Officiating a Wedding

I don't do as many weddings as I used to because I work on such an amazing team of pastors, but it's always special to officiate for people who are special to me! This past weekend, I got to officiate Cullen Capili's wedding. Cullen was in my Core back in 2009-2010 as a freshman, and I got to study FOJ with him that year. We've stayed friends the many years since he graduated and went on to become a physical therapist. Congrats, Dr. Capili!

Why are those lights so shiny!?

Student Testimony

Thank you for your support, encouragement, and prayers! You make this ministry possible and share in its fruit!