Hello everyone,
My first priority each year for this September communication is to say THANK YOU to all of you campus staff for engaging over these crucial weeks in outreach to new grad students (and even creative attempts to connect with faculty that may be new to campus or just new to you). Fields are ripe for reaping: drawing men and women into our spiritually-forming and gospel-witnessing communities for sure, but also, inviting folks to respond to the love of God in Christ even now. Just this morning, I got a text about a law school student at NYU crossing the threshold of faith.
This month, the GFM Leadership Team convened in Atlanta. The Lord met us in surprising and encouraging ways. In keeping with our spiritual foundation stone for this year (Jesus, teach us to pray—and long for revival; Father, give us the Holy Spirit—from Luke 11), we studied Acts 4:1-31. This text challenged us about the nexus between healing, proclamation, and prayer, especially the three-fold request of the believers (after opposition from the authorities): Lord, see the threats…grant your servants to speak your word with boldness…stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders. And the place where they were praying was shaken and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. Lord, teach us all to pray; Father, give us all the Holy Spirit.
We also invited a church historian (Dr. Jeff Waldrop, Dean of the Libraries, Mercer U.) to give us a presentation on the history of revival in the American church, followed by an hour of discussion and prayer. We were both sobered (revivals have always been messy, unpredictable) and encouraged (God can move in ways that not only change throngs of individuals but bring greater renewal and shalom to communities and society). We will continue praying with humility for God’s Kingdom to come on campus in surprising, healing, justice-increasing, touching-the-marginalized ways. Please join us in a humble posture of sober expectancy.
In fact, prayer threaded through our meeting.
- We received training from Dr. Alice Brown-Collins on how to form a small (e.g. 4) team of intercessors who are equipped and committed to praying for us daily as individuals and at least monthly as a group. Our eventual goal is that every GFM staff person has a team of intercessor praying in some regular pattern.
- We got an update on the EveryCampus project that InterVarsity and Cru are co-sponsoring this year with a goal of seeing a prayer walk on all 4,948 campuses by the end of 2019. The website (https://portal.everycampus.com/) makes it easy to find a campus nearby that remains to be prayed for. I encourage you sometime this fall to locate one within range that you could visit (with a colleague or partner?) to walk and pray.
- One other note on the opportunity to pray with our undergrad staff colleagues. If you are on a campus with undergrad counterparts, I invite you to take gracious initiative to connect with them and especially seek a time to pray together--for each other and for the campus. Of course, the other place where we will get to pray and worship and build good will with many colleagues will be SC 20 in Orlando. Plus, we will have a space for prayer as a GFM community on our Epiphany morning gathering at the end of the conference!
Recent Reading
I often ask people “What are you reading these days?” In case you are interested, here are three books that I have found engaging of late:
- The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses by William Egginton. A thoughtful grappling with the complexity of the well-intended but often fraught aspirations of students, faculty and administrators on our polarized campuses.
- The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump by Pete Wehner. A heavy-hearted lament combined with a guardedly hopeful roadmap for repair over time by a principled Conservative and committed Christian who models integration of faith, thought and practice.
- I’ve been Meaning to Tell You: A letter to My Daughter by David Chariandy. A Canadian of Trinidadian heritage married to a white woman, Chariandy writes this short honest and poignant letter/memoir/essay to his 13-year-old, mixed-race daughter, wanting to help her better understand who she is and where she is in a world stained by racism and injustice. I found this a helpful window into race, ethnicity, identity, and humanity since it explores these matters in the slightly different, but surprisingly similar, context of Canada.
What are you reading these days? How are you continuing to learn, for example, about our campus mission field, our larger cultural context, and our ongoing desire to be cross-culturally fluent?
