New Beginnings

        It’s a new year but I feel like God’s been making things new for a while now. Usually campus ministry can often feel new because there are always new freshmen and new leaders leading the ministry, and even sometimes new staff.  This year there seems to be more of a spiritual renewal. In 2012 God was working the same thing in my personal life and ministry life as He was with my church (Calvary Baptist Church in NYC). There seemed to be a Spirit-led call in 2012 to focus on prayer. I often prayed that God would not let my students feel complacent in their walks with Jesus and that students who don’t know Him personally would have a hunger to know Him.

This past semester, two students prayed to receive Christ at Kean’s weekly Bible study meetings called Cru.  Throughout the semester, two Muslim student women attended Cru on three separate occasions and invited us to their Muslim Student Association (MSA) meetings.  My attendance to two of their meetings caused the rest of the Muslim students to inquire more about Christianity, its differences from Islam, and its origin! I’m happy to say that as a result of God’s response to our prayers, there are five newly involved leaders who are soon to be spiritual multipliers and are currently ready to be discipled and trained to help lead a small movement, share their faith boldly and build into others. Another answered prayer is Joel Aponte (pictured kneeling), this year’s intern who is working at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Kean University. Joel has been a positive influence on some of the men at Kean, the ministry at NJIT and with students across the state. Please pray for him as he follows God’s lead in choosing his new career path, whether with Cru full-time or something else.

With some ladies from Kean at Fall Retreat

What’s interesting about “new beginnings” is that it often comes from something that had to die. In order to embrace something new, we often have to let go of something old. This year at Fall Retreat, our theme was “unmasked” for the purpose of encouraging our students to appropriately expose what needed to be surrendered to death and receive the life God wanted to replace it with. This ties in beautifully with this year’s RADIATE conference theme, RESTORE. After confessing areas of struggle at Fall Retreat, God brought many of them to RADIATE to sew in them a sense of hope in the beauty of restoration.

Restoration is the healing of something old so that it is made to be new or the transformation of something once “dead” into life. Restoration can’t come without first the thing it’s restoring having been surrendered to death. My role this year at RADIATE was to lead a seminar on “Complete Surrender” and it was so encouraging to see God work in my life through new beginnings as he worked out my surrender in this seminar. (To view my seminar talk, type my full name into the search bar at prezi.com)

Please continue to pray for these young Christian leaders who are processing through the fire hydrant of information they’ve been given and are also determining the next steps in complete surrender to new beginnings in their own lives.

___________________________________________________________________

Praise God! Including a new apartment, God has provided ALL of my needs! I’m financially secure with generous gifts from you all with your end-of-the-year giving! Thanks!

Students are on break and will return mid-January. Please pray they are each a witness in their own home & are mentally preparing for school & ministry beginning soon!

Staff - NJ is home to the most unchurched county in the world & raising support here proves it. Please pray for God to provide monthly support for Joey & Jen Sforza (in Jersey City) so that they may report soon to full-time campus ministry!