by Dirk Wiese,
As Fall Kickoff season has since passed, The Good Life College Ministry at the University of Northern Iowa continues to discover new ways to be strategic on campus. Fall Kickoff can be seen as the biggest several weeks at the beginning of the year to meet new people, share the gospel, and get students connected to ministries. Many new students get connected, but there remains to be around 90% of the campus that is unreached. The Good Life works to reach the campus in different ways such as equipping our students individually and forming our discipleship to include bold, loving, and risky mission, but we are always trying to be creative with trying new things.
This month we took a simple approach: set up shop in the Union and hand out hot drinks to students passing by. Our aim was to simply interact with students, give them coffee or hot chocolate, and get to deeper conversations about the gospel. We had our table set up for a few hours on a Wednesday morning and asked for God to provide. By the end of the morning, we had a number of conversations and collected a few cards with contact information. Two notable conversations were with Remo and Chavi. Remo grew up in a Catholic family but had since fallen away from most things involved or affiliated with faith. However, recently he had a growing desire to make steps in knowing God more. Chavi is a freshman who made known that he was not a Christian, but he was still interested in talking about things related to the gospel. Both guys filled out contact cards for us to have follow-up conversations!
We are looking forward to doing this again in the spring semester to meet more students and by God’s grace see them come alive in the gospel. These few hours showed that there is no such thing as an October lull or even an abyss in the Spring semester where it seems there are no more people interested. They are there and they are hungry for something more, but we must pray fervently and expectantly as we long for God to reach more of the campus!
During the school year, the leadership team of The Good Life College Ministry meets every month. Our leadership team consists of one of Redeemer Church’s pastors and his wife, another married couple in their twenties, and our six student leaders. The meetings involve a variety of things such as discipleship and shepherding issues, event planning, outreach, and prayer for the campus. This group has done a terrific job in our Fall Kickoff campaign and helping minister to our existing students.
At our last meeting, we started planning for a kind of training that we had never done before. This training will be held in the spring semester on a Saturday for an all-day intensive experience. The day will be broken up into different sections involving the Bible, theology, mission, and leadership. Students will share meals together and experience different interactive teaching styles as the student leaders will teach portions of the training! This something that we have never done at this level before, but our student leaders became very excited to take on this challenge. Together we see this as something that goes beyond a classroom setting and into the everyday lives of the students in the Spring semester. We see this training as a crucial catalytic experience for the students who God is raising up to be student leaders in the coming Fall of 2019. By God’s grace, He will use this training to raise up more laborers to go in and gather the harvest at UNI.
