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Outreach and Assertiveness

Hey friends and partners in ministry,

God has been doing some really neat things on the college campus this month and I'm excited to share them with you. In a normal month we have a team of students from Washington come down to DFW and spend their spring break doing outreach on our campuses. And we often cancel all of our events that week to join them in evangelism and outreach. This year, due to Covid, the team from Washington could not come down and join us. But, Emily Umstead, who is one of the campus pastors on our team, had a great idea! What if we just spend the whole week doing outreach anyways? Let's take things off our calendar, focus our time and efforts on being on campus, meeting students all week, and just see what God does!

As you can see above God really showed up! Not only were the students already involved in our ministry excited for the opportunity to reach out to their peers, the students walking by were interested in coming and joining us for conversations. The question on the board was "What do you think God is like and why?" and this question led to a lot of really neat conversations. A number of students that we met during outreach actually came to our easter sermon last week where I got to preach through Mark 16. Afterwards I had an atheist student come up and thank me and tell me that he plans to keep coming, and that hes even going to join one of our mens small groups because he wants to use his time in college to learn more about Jesus! Later that same evening at our after event I sat across the table from an agnostic student named Ethan that asked a lot of great questions about how do we understand the bible and why is Jesus so important? He also said he plans to come back this week and I plan to invite him to study the bible one on one. God is so good!



This month we also got to host for our students a seminar on the topic of assertiveness. Dr. Pickering, who is a counselor in DFW came and shared with our students how being assertive as opposed to passive or aggressive can really transform our relationships and ministry. He talked to our students about how to become rooted in their identity in Christ and how to feel empowered to respond to the world around them with a Christ-like assertive attitude. Jesus said what needed to be said and did what needed to be done to confront the powers and bring the Kingdom of God. Many of our students afterwards told me how grateful they were for the opportunity to learn how they can be assertive like Jesus.

Thank you for partnering with me in the mission to make and mature disciples of Jesus on every college campus in DFW. I can't thank you enough for your investment. I hope you can see through this post how God is using your investment to bring that vision to reality right now. As always don't forget to read the student testimony down below! Thank you, thank you, thank you. In Christ, Austin.



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