By Jenny Calsyn, The Salt Company Coordinator
January felt like 2 different months. The first half of the month was filled with preparations for the leadership retreat and kickoff and the second half was filled with putting those plans into action. God continues to remind us that He is in control of this ministry and we just get to be used by Him.
With our students being gone the first half of January, the staff was able to really focus on both planning for the semester and continuing to find ways to rest before the students came back. This was a refreshing time for us and has really helped to allow us to go hard this semester.
On January 15th we had the first part of our leaders retreat. Our 11 leaders got together at one of our Elder’s house for a night of worship and prayer. It was fun to cast the vision for the semester and give our students time to pray for each other and to pray for their connection groups. We had our co-leaders take communion together and encouraged them to preach the gospel over each other before going to the table.
We were supposed to have our second portion of the leaders retreat on January 16th but had to cancel due to a snowstorm. We rescheduled it for the following Sunday afternoon and were able to go over everything then. We talked through the semester calendar with our leaders and went over leadership expectations again.
One huge answer to prayer is that we just added our first Cornell student to our leadership team this semester. We have had lots of access and interaction with students at Mount Mercy, Coe and Kirkwood but are waiting for open doors to be able to be on campus at Cornell. Cuyler came to us through Veritas Church and heard about Salt Company through that. We have been so impressed with his boldness to share Jesus at his school. Last year he was bringing a group of 8 to our ministry each week. We continue to see him bringing new students and are excited to see what God will do with through him this semester.
We had our kickoff on January 19th. The staff always is tempted to feel a lot more nervous about who will come to our Spring kickoff since we don’t have the same amount of time on campuses to promote it before. The need to remind each other that it’s God that draws students and not ourselves is so important. We had 65 at our kickoff and many of them were new students. God is continuing to grow our core but also drawing new people to Salt and it is so encouraging to see. We continue to see around 60 students this semester so far and are praying for God to grow that number so that we can see more and more students come to know the gospel.
Exciting upcoming events for next month are the start of Theology of the gospel and hearing about what the Spring Conference did in our students. We can’t wait to share those things with you and are so thankful for your support! God is so good to all of us.
