April

The Sons of Faded Glory represent: WHAAAAAAATTTT!?!?!?!

"Those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God." Romans 8:14

    It's odd to think that tonight--May 1st--is the last official core get-together for the glorious Sons! I could attempt to tell you how great these guys are, but I would not do them justice. Here are a few words to describe them: outrageous, loud, weird, honest, encouraging, challenging, inquisitive, and loving. Through weekly core get-togethers, one-on-one lunches, bible studies, racquetball matches, church game nights, and apartment haircuts, we've grown together in commitment to Christ and each other. It has been an honor to get to co-lead this group of guys with Grant Trotter.

This past Sunday, a few of us went to help Dallas SOUL Church serve and minister to the homeless. We distributed clothes and had an awesome time of worship, prayer and encouragement to always have praise for God on our lips and a heart for people.

 

It is amazing to see how ready and willing these students are to wake up at 5am to be downtown by 6:15am and take the time to have meaningful conversations with complete strangers. One of our guys even got some shoes and clothes from his car and gave them to a guy he met there!

    The week before we had some students go help with the tornado relief in the city of Lancaster, TX.

    Your faithfulness in supporting our ministry is bearing much fruit. Rejoice! And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for caring about the spiritual lives of college students.

March: Too Much Fun!

Dear Friends and Family,

You're The Best

Bowling with Brandon, Travis and the other interns!

I would like to start off this month's update thanking y'all for your support of me and this ministry at UTDallas. Because of your cheerful and generous donations, I have been blessed to spend these past 8 months building relationships with students and make them disciples of Christ. The time I have spent in bible study with Ronnie and the other interns has really helped me see how I can continue to be an ambassador for Christ when I leave for medical school this summer. I am learning how to read, study, and use Scripture effectively and get at the right questions. It is all really exciting, and I have you to thank!

Spring Break
So over Spring Break, 16 FOCUS guys and I went down to Enchanted Rock in Fredericksburg, TX, to camp, hike, climb, and cave-crawl (spelunking might be the official term). It wasn't what you might call "a relaxing getaway" but it was definitely cool just getting to be around the guys in my core and from other cores over course 2 1/2 days in the "sticks." We had the opportunity work as a team to get through the tiniest little cave spaces you could imagine, serve each other by retrieving water 2 miles away from our camp and by washing dishes, and get to know each other's stories and interests.

Not For Sale
We had our Not For Sale campaign this past week to raise awareness for human-trafficking and inform students how to advocate for the victims and get involved. I really felt like it went well. We showed a documentary on Wednesday night and had a speaker who is involved with International Justice Mission (IJM) on Thursday night outside in the middle of campus. During the day we had displays that had real trafficking testimonies on them and statistics about human trafficking. It is awful how much slave trading and sexual exploitation is going on all around us--yes, even in the America! We need to continue to pray about this issue that God would move the right people (including us) to act on behalf of the hurting, dying, and enslaved. The only hope we have in bringing restoration to this world is through Jesus Christ and His power.


Check out www.ijm.org for more info on human trafficking.


                                                                          Talk to you soon,
                                                                          Andrew

Spent a few days in Austin over Spring Break with Shawn and his family!

Got to see some old high school friends and fellow youth workers, too!

February

Top Story

My friend Taylor (mentioned in my last update) was baptized on February 23rd! After some weeks talking about the importance of faith, obedience, repentance and discipleship, we are finishing up our Focus On Jesus study with being "Sent Into the World".

All-Campus Worship Night
This past Sunday night, we held a campus-wide worship night that we coordinated with the other Christian ministries on campus. It was powerful! We sang and danced. We interceded for each other and for the different ministries. We also prayed for our upcoming Not For Sale campaign (March 26-30), which is an effort to raise awareness for human-trafficking and how to advocate for the victims. We prayed for the victims, the survivors, the perpetrators, our hearts to be changed, and that NFS week would bring about change that glorified God. 


Our God is a God of justice. 


"The LORD loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love." Ps33:5


"Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the LORD understand it fully." Prov28:5


"The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern." Prov29:7


We didn't sing this song at the Worship Night but the words capture the essence of what we need to instill in students on campus, our Church, and our own hearts:

God of Justice, Saviour to all
Came to rescue the weak and the poor
Chose to serve and not be served

Jesus, You have called us
Freely we've received
Now freely we will give

We must go live to feed the hungry
Stand beside the broken
We must go
Stepping forward keep us from just singing
Move us into action
We must go

To act justly everyday
Loving mercy in everyway
Walking humbly before You God

You have shown us, what You require
Freely we've received
Now freely we will give

Fill us up and send us out
Fill us up and send us out
Fill us up and send us out Lord 
 
GOD OF JUSTICE by Tim Hughes


Let us pray for Christian unity, transformed hearts and lives, and His kingdom expanded! Thank you again for all of your support and prayers.

Taylor and his family!

January

Here is a quick Winter Camp update:

- The first thing that Eddie did was make all 250 of us memorize Psalm 84:11 "For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord gives grace and glory; no good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly."

- Eddie focused on Joshua as a priority-keeper, a promise-keeper, and a humble man.

- We broke up into different groups to discuss different aspects of evangelism and how to present the good news to other students who need to hear it.

UTD FOCUS @ Winter Camp

God is good all the time. A guy who had been inconsistent in coming to core and struggling with transferring schools, came up to me during camp and asked me what he needed to do get baptized. I didn't know what to say at first but then offered to look at some Scriptures with him and discuss what this decision to make Christ Lord truly means. So we have met up three times since camp, and it has been the beginning of a rewarding and honest relationship. Please pray for God's Spirit and Word to reveal His truth to us fully as we continue our study.

On a bigger scale, our Friday Night Fellowships have been bringing in more and more visitors, believers and non-believers, and cores are filling up left and right. It is so exciting to be able to work alongside such faithful student leaders and God as he draws people to himself. Please pray that we will be great listeners and friends to everyone who walks through our doors on Friday nights.

FOCUS Winter Camp 2012

Once again, I cannot emphasize enough how important you are to our success in ministering to these students. Thank you so much for your prayers and encouragements.

Much love,
Andrew

December's Past: It's A New Year!

Happy New Year's Everyone!

Winter Staff Retreat 2012 

Sorry about not having a post on January 1^st for December. Because things die down during the Christmas break, I wanted to wait until after our staff retreat to share with you some of exciting things to come!

Winter Camp is this weekend! For those of y'all who don't know, Winter Camp is a four-day retreat in Bridgeport where all four of our campus ministries come together to fellowship, worship and refocus on our mission to see students' lives saved and radically changed by God. I am really looking forward to it. This Winter Camp marks my fourth “anniversary” of being a part of FOCUS. Four years ago, I signed up for camp because a handful of my friends who were already a part of FOCUS invited me. By the end of it, I knew almost everyone and had befriended many guys who continue to love and challenge me in my pursuit of Christ today. This is an important weekend for our students. Please be praying for them, our leaders and our guest speaker, Eddie Howard. Pray for open and willing hearts, healthy relationships and God's will to be done.

Let's talk about December.

Before we left for break, we had a multi-CORE Christmas party at the Richardson House (aka the Mancave). 

We also had an awesome Christmas party where we split into different families and had our own unique Christmas traditions. At the end of the night, we held a Christmas song competition where different cores performed traditional and nontraditional Christmas songs, as well as some original parodies. It was a blast. Here's a picture of my family, the Bradys.

The Brady Family

I want to express my gratitude to you for allowing me to serve these wonderful students. God is doing great things on our campuses! Let's praise Him for His goodness and His faithfulness.

November: Beware of Christianese

Good News:

     We had an outreach table set up for two days on campus where we had a whiteboard with the question, “If Jesus came back today, what would He have to say to Americans?” and students could come up and write their thoughts down for others to see. It was a great chance to get some perspective on what students thought about Jesus and His character and provided a venue for Christian students to speak truth to the rest of the campus. Two really exciting things happened on the first day.
     First, I noticed an old classmate of mine studying in the Comet Cafe with whom I had had a few spiritual conversations with at different times a while ago. Not having seen him in many months, I was determined to ask him if he would like to get together to talk about and learn more about the God of the Bible, and to my delight, he said yes! We've started going over the first lesson of Faith Fundamentals and talking about who God is and how He is different from the gods of other religions and even Nature. Please pray that we will continue to discover God's truth together and that His will would be done in and through our friendship.
     Second, one other old classmate was selling bracelets to help her brother pay for medicial treatments, and I was able to help her and talk to her for a bit. When I told her that I was doing this ministry internship this year, she opened up and shared her experience with church. God gave me a sweet opportunity to empathize with her on some of the wrongs the church has done and point her back to the important elements of Christianity—that we are fallen and require the grace of perfect God who created us and loves us dearly.

The Sons of Faded Glory (aka our core) at Fall Camp

     Here is one other exciting story! One of the guys in our core who isn't Christian texted me at 8:30am on a Sunday morning, asking me what time church was because he didn't have his morning work shift anymore. When I finally woke up around 9am, I told him that I could come pick him up, and so he went to church with us and lunch with some of the guys afterwards. I don't know exactly what is keeping him in our core or drawing him to our Friday Night Fellowships or church but I know he's expressing interest and that it must be a God deal. Let us pray that God would minister to him through our community and bring him to an understanding of God's will for his life.

UTD Interns FTW (For The Win!) We love our supporters!

What I've Been Learning:

     In our intern class, we were dicussing where we have come as the Church and how it compares to the early church. Matt, one of the other interns, pointed out that we, as Christians, need to be careful when we use “meaningless” Christian words/phrases around non-Christians. What do I mean by “meaningless” Christian words? I mean things like “minister to” and “personal walk/relationship with God.” Even words like “faith”, “repentance”, and “grace” sometimes lack true depth or meaning to Christians who hear the lingo often. So how much less will non-Christians understand the depth and meaning of our testimony if we continue to abbreviate our lives with these Christianese words.

     Today, my co-worker at the high school I tutor at asked me what I was doing this year, so I told her, “Well, I'm working as an intern campus minister for one of the Christian campus ministries at UTD.” As I was telling her this, she was giving me this blank stare that told me, “I don't know what you're talking about” or “Oooh, he's one of those religious fanatics.” She then asked me, “So do you want to going into the religious field?” This gave me the chance to simply tell her that I was doing this internship to develop habits of loving and caring for other people, and to learn how to integrate pastoral elements into my life as a physician in the future. I realized that after I said this, she was able to understand why I would even consider taking a year to do something seeminly unrelated to my career path. It clicked in her mind. But only after I took out the Christianese.

     My encouragement isn't to remove all “religious” words from your speech—it is to know your audience to know when those kinds of words are useful and relevant and when they are not. Religious words do not improve your testimony—truthful and meaningful words do.

1 Corinthians 9:19: “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win the more; 20 and to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might win those who are under the law; 21 to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law; 22 to the weak I became as weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. 23 Now this I do for the gospel's sake, that I may be partaker of it with you.”

Two-Thirds of the ManCave Inhabitants (aka my roommates)

Let us have the heart and speech of a servant as we try to bring more into God's kingdom!

October: Trust in God, He Knows Best

Good News First: One of our international grad students from China, Sam Bo, decided to devote his life to following Christ and was baptized after FOCUS Friday the 28^th of October! It was so good to see his dedication in studying the Word and seeking answers to spiritual questions come to fruition. Praise God for “there is much rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15).

In our corefa class at the beginning of the month, we read 1 Thessalonians 2:1-16, and a few things stood out to me:

1. In the context of sharing the gospel in spite of strong opposition, Paul and his fellow ministers spoke “as men approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. [They] are not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts…[They] were not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else” (vv.4-6).
2. v.8 says they loved the church in Thessalonica so much that they were delighted to share with them not only the gospel of God but their lives as well, because they had become so dear to them.

We should not sugarcoat or soften the truth of tough biblical principles as if God needed us to filter it or water it down to make it more palatable. We are not doing anyone any favors by allowing people to believe half-truths (which are also half-lies!) in order to stay comfortable or satisfied with not wrestling with the tough principles we find in the Bible—of which there are many!

That being said, we cannot become so didactic in our approach to ministry that we forget to share our lives either. So many of Jesus’ parables deal with how we relate to one another beyond the act of sharing the Gospel. The law can be summed up as love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. God wants us to be poor in spirit and able to mourn (sensitive to what saddens Him as well as what gladden Him. Matt 5). We cannot do this unless we share our lives with others and invite others into our lives.

GOD has been teaching me to rely more on Him than on myself when it comes to being able to minister to guys that I meet with each week. Sometimes, I have no idea what I am going to talk about with them or how to get beyond the less important small talk. I simply go into those appointments having prayed that God would use and direct me, and each time without fail, God has taken the conversation in a direction that I could not have planned better on my own.

I met with one guy in my core who finds it hard to reach out to new people, and the conversation wasn’t anything life-changing—“How are things with the roommates?” “How’s school?” etc. We’ve talked about how one his spiritual goals is to be more outgoing, but I was having trouble moving him forward toward that goal. Then the Spirit reminded me of the sermon by Matt Chandler that I had listened to the night before about spiritual gifts and the role different members play as part of one, unified body. I pulled up 1 Corinthians 12 on my phone and we read it there outside:

⁴There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. ⁵There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. ⁶There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.

After we finished reading, I asked him to tell me what he thought his spiritual gift was. From there we talked about how he could be more purposeful about using that gift to build up the body of Christ. It was the bomb.com. Trusting in God is way better than trusting in myself. God has really been trying to get me to learn this lesson this month.

Hm…I have so much more to share about worship and prayer and other things that have been going on in the body of Christ here at UTD. It is definitely an exciting place to be!

I will post again sometime in the next two weeks to share some others things God has been doing through this campus ministry and your prayer and support!

Love y’all!