Heading to Bellingham! First Time Since 2019!

In a little over a week, we will be heading to NW SICM (Student Institute of Campus Ministry) in Bellingham, WA, for the first time in 3 years. We put on our own SICM last year, but it just wasn't the same. Our crew this year is just as big as ever--94 students and 19 pastors! I'm so excited to see the fruit of this intensive training and spiritual development, not to mention the friendships and community that will be built, when we return to our campuses this fall. We're even taking 7 students from Tarrant County College, a new school we started at this year! Please pray for safety, that COVID doesn't disrupt the trip for anyone, and that the Spirit will move powerfully through this trip yet again.

Leadership Pictures

I wanted to share a few pictures of the amazing teams of young leaders that I get to lead and work with each week. God is doing cool things through your gifts and prayers!

This is our UTD pastoral staff for the year (minus Victoria who is out on maternity leave). Through their servant leadership, our community at UTD has come out of the pandemic as strong as ever!

Taylor has been my apprentice this year! Such a blessing to work with him.

Our entire core leadership team doing the UTD "whoosh." These are the students and pastors who led our small groups to reach 300+ students this school year. They are an outstanding bunch!

These are the men in my peer team who I coached in ministry this year. They insisted on sitting in my lap for this picture. They have all truly been a joy to work with. From left to right, it's Jonathan, Jackson, Harrison, Tony, and Taylor. Only Jonathan will be back at UTD in the fall, so I will have a new bunch to invest in!

Student Testimony

Hearing from Our Seniors

Near the end of each year, we invite all of our graduating students to write a letter, an "epistle," to our community and then read it on video. We've been playing these at our Friday night meetings a couple at a time. I wanted to share a couple of them with you so you can directly see the impact that your partnership is making on campus!

Jackson is one of the young men I've had the opportunity to mentor this year. He's been a great leader to his peers as well as to me. He loves God's word, as you can see by how steeped in it his message is.

Sion has been in both our Collin and UTD ministries. He has worked hard to grow in the Lord and is an inspiration to many others. Everyone knows Sion!

Alumni Testimony

Danni actually worked on staff with us for a year a few years back. She came from China not knowing the Lord, and it was through her friendship with a fellow student in FOCUS that she became a disciple of Jesus who in turn discipled others. Thank you for making stories like these possible! I couldn't be on campus working with these students if you weren't praying and paying. :)

A Few Things Coming Up

Student Institute of Campus Ministry

SICM is coming up in May, and our Showcase fundraiser last weekend was a big success! Thank you to all of you who came and were SO GENEROUS!!!

If you didn't get to attend, we have a video you can watch at anyfocus.org/showcase! You can also make a donation toward sending students to SICM there, but you can watch without any sort of donation. It was a great show, and I hope some of you who couldn't be there in person will check it out!

The big challenge we are facing with SICM is that not many students are signing up. With only a couple of days left until our original deadline, we have less than half of the normal number signed up. It's been 3 years since we've taken students to Bellingham, so we only have a few still around who have been and who can tell the others what it's like. Even with our normal momentum, it can be a challenge to ask freshmen to invest that much time and money to travel with a group they don't know well across the country. This is a year for rebuilding that momentum, so please pray that a larger group will decide to attend this training that has been so pivotal for our mission. 

Spring Outreach

Moving in the other direction, we have two teams of students from Washington State coming down the week after our Spring Break to join our community in doing targeted outreach and evangelism at UTD and Collin College. This is another thing that hasn't happened since 2019, and we are excited to get back to it! Pray for many fruitful, kingdom conversations with students on these campuses.

A Significant Schedule Shift

For April, May, and part of June I will be cutting my hours with students and staff back to take three seminary courses. I'll share more about them in future updates, but I'm excited to spend some more targeted time learning, and I'm even more excited about the prospect of being able to finish my MAT (Master of Arts in Theology) by the end of 2022! This has been a good experience, but I'm ready to have it off my plate.

Thank you for your prayers and financial gifts to make this mission to the campus possible. It is truly not something I could do alone!

Student Testimony

Lots Going On!

We got to have Winter Camp! It was stressful with all that was going on with COVID, but we still took about 440 people out to Sky Ranch for our first Winter Camp in 2 years. Rikk Watts, who spoke back in 2016, came back to do a set of follow-on lessons. His goal was to present a compelling apologetic, helping young people see that the modern world and most of what we value in it was made possible by the gospel of Jesus Christ. He argued from an extensive understanding of history that the gospel of Jesus Christ is why things change (including technology), why we value humans and human rights, and why modern science is possible (valuing experiential testing over detached philosophy, among others. These young people are understanding in a new way that they can hold their heads high as Christians rather than being embarrassed or trying to hide it. It's heady stuff, but well worth listening to and pondering. You can listen to or watch all of the talks here!

Showcase is on February 26!

We are getting ready for our annual Showcase fundraiser to raise money to send new student leaders to SICM, the Student Institute of Campus Ministry. You can find all the details and buy tickets at anyfocus.org/showcase. This event is SO fun. It's not a talent show, but rather a carefully curated show featuring many of the most talented performers from among our students and alumni. It also features an artisan market with art and various products made by people in our community. SICM is a great deal, but it's still out of range for many of our students, and this event helps make it possible every year for us to continue raising up the next generation of student leaders.

Student Testimony

Thank you for helping make stories like these possible!

Omicron Challenges

We're coming back from a refreshing Christmas break, but Omicron is bringing a number of changes that we are trying to navigate: 

1. We postponed our winter staff retreat to mid-February. This is an important event for our apprentices, and we had a number of people test positive for COVID in the days leading up to it. Thankfully, the vacation rental we were going to use allowed us to change our reservation with no penalty!
2. Multiple of our campuses, including UTD, have opted to go fully online for the first three weeks of school this semester. (UTD had already pushed back the start of the semester by a week.) We are in the process of figuring out how to get our cores and one-on-one Bible studies going again rather than delaying another month, as well as how and where to have our larger weekly fellowship meetings.
3. Winter Camp is this coming weekend (Jan 14-17)! We had to cancel completely last year, so we are excited and eager to move forward with having camp this year. Rikk Watts, who has spoken at camp before and has had a huge impact on our community, is scheduled to come. However, with the Omicron surge and many of our students remaining out of state because of the delay in getting classes back on campus, we are looking at coming in way under our contracted minimum for the camp. Please join us in praying that we can work that out with the camp and that we can take as many students as possible as safely as possible.

For all of this, we need lots of grace and wisdom! Thank you for your continued prayers and financial support throughout the pandemic as we navigate new challenges. Even with so many new hurdles, our mission continues to grow and expand on DFW college campuses. Students are being introduced to Jesus and getting to know him better. They are being loved into the kingdom, and your love for them is a part of that!

I'll make sure to make Rikk's talks available when we have them! I know you'll be blessed.

Student Testimony

Thanksgiving and on to Christmas!

I wanted to share this meaningful reflection on Thanksgiving from Brady Bobbink:

Every place I go shows the broad loss of Thanksgiving as a day of thoughtful remembrance. For those of us who desire to be authentic and maturing followers of the Abba Father of our Lord Jesus, the creator and sustainer of all, we will have to work more consciously and intentionally to root into our own hearts and the hearts of those around us the power and place of being thankful to the Lord. You will get little to no help from your culture on this one. Remember Paul writing to Timothy and the church at Ephesus, reminding him/them of this distressing reality: “ But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves… lovers of money…not lovers of God… unthankful…” (ungrateful in other translations).

Thankfulness has a direct relationship to the issue of egocentric love. Thankfulness requires space in our hearts and minds for something other than the self and its incessant demanding desires. Oh, I know all about being a “self-made” man. But that is a narcissist’s fable –– an American legend. Fake news! No one makes him or herself. From the beginning we are made, and all the chances we have to use our physical strength, our creative minds, and the freedom of our will, are all gifts from the Creator’s love. Paul says it concisely in 1 Cor.4:7 when he asks, “What do you have that you did not receive?”

I think this year thankfulness will require more thoughtfulness from each of us. It is still Covid-time. There have been many losses both great and small. Things anticipated, maybe even taken for granted, have been lost. In such times we likely will not be propelled easily by our emotions to offer rich and deeply grateful thanksgiving. I get that! But I came across the quote from Helen Keller and she inspired me to slow down and see the rays of the Lord’s light in the midst of darkness and the faith to hold tightly to the vision of confident hope in God’s love and promises to us in Jesus. She said: “For three things I thank God every day of my life: thanks that he has vouchsafed me knowledge of his works; deep thanks that he has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to –– a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song.” –– Helen Keller

One of my most meaningful Thanksgiving traditions (going on 5 years now!) is that I get together with 2 good friends, Peter and Paul, and our wives/girlfriends for fajitas on Black Friday and spend a significant amount of time sharing about the things and people and qualities in one another that we are thankful for. If the giving thanks part of your Thanksgiving took a back seat to the feasting part, I encourage you to carve out some time in the next couple of weeks for purposeful gratitude before we plunge full force into this next season of of adding even more gifts to our list of things to be thankful for!

New to Jesus

One of the sweet blessings of this year has been the number of students, and especially young women, who are approaching Jesus for the first time. One of our women pastors is leading a Bible study for a team on campus. One of the young ladies attending doesn't have a Christian background, and when she was asked why she came, she said "I prayed that I would make this team, and when I did, I figured I should do God a solid and go to a Bible study." Now she is actively learning about Jesus and his plan for her. I love it! Reminds me of Paul saying "So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer." God can use even our weakness to show his glory.

Another story reminds me so much of these sweet words from the Christmas narrative: "Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.'” A young woman doing graduate work at UTD doesn't have any Christian family or background, but was aware of a FOCUS ministry at her undergraduate university. She was into spirituality, tarot cards, and numerology, and this past summer kept seeing the number 122 in different places. Trying to understand, she googled "122 Bible verse" and Hebrews 12:2 popped up: "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." So she saw a FOCUS yard sign on campus and signed up for Fall Camp online! She is now in a core, has become a Christian, and is eager for her family to come to know Jesus as well. Doesn't that remind you of those eastern astrologers following a star but finding Jesus!? God, in his grace, speaks to us in our language rather than demanding that we first learn his. God is good! I'm definitely crying after writing that!

A Couple of Highlights

We had our UTD ministry Christmas party and service last Friday. Our theme was "Christmas Morning." This is my sweet staff team. They are amazing! And how did we ever end up with twice as many women as men at UTD!?

These are the four student small group leaders I mentor this year. They are so sweet and encouraging to me. Working with them is a delight!

We did it! Thanks to my brother Casey's leadership, we were able to raise our entire goal in one student giving day + Giving Tuesday. A massive THANK YOU to all who took part!

Student Testimony & Prayer Requests

Comparing with Two Years Ago

For many reasons, we aren't a ministry that fixates a lot on counting and numbers. But we do take a look at our involvement numbers at least every October so we can compare year-over-year involvement in our campus activities. Looking at UTD's 2019 (pre-pandemic) numbers compared to 2021, the number of students involved in core are basically the same--275 to 274! (there is always some room for error since attendance changes week to week). It's exciting to see that coming out of such a crazy season, just as many students are consistently involved in these smaller groups where they are known and loved and are ministered to individually! 

The average attendance for our weekly large group at UTD is down some in the same time period, 183 to 160. (To be fair, the 2019 number was for two services, Tuesdays and Fridays, added together whereas now we are only meeting on Fridays. So it's possible that availability is a factor.) Our Fall Camp attendance (which we knew would be a tough sell with the pandemic still going) dropped from 177 (2019) to 138 this year. All of this is consistent with the growing social anxiety that is so common in Gen Z. 

As we head into our first in-person Pizza Theology in two years (on Nov 14!) as well as Winter Camp in January, we're hoping that we can persuade more students to take part in these key experiences or else ultimately find new, more effective ways of accomplishing the same goals. Will you join us in praying about that? We need a special measure of wisdom and creativity! 

Of course, none of these activities is sacred, not even core or a weekly service on campus. Our mission remains the same: To Make and Mature Disciples to God's Glory. We adapted during the pandemic, we're adapting to this new generation, and we'll adapt again and again as needed. The need is as great as ever, with so many more who have never heard the Good News about Jesus and who are so very confused by all the messages they are hearing from the culture. My prayer is that every Jesus-follower on campus will be creative and bold in shining the light of Christ to the people they encounter--loving them, serving them, taking an active interest in them. These students are doing very real ministry every single day, and I'm honored that you've chosen to be a part of it through your prayers and generosity!