If you’ve heard of Project, you’ve probably also heard of CCP.
If you haven’t, let me fill you in.
CCP stands for “Cross Cultural Project.” Every year, CO Minneapolis sends a small team of students and CO staff overseas for part of the summer. For the past few years, the location has been India. The teams would spend time building relationships and sharing the gospel with college students on a campus in New Delhi. Last year, there was an additional team sent to Lebanon to explore potentially expanding Campus Outreach to a college campus in Beirut.
This year, the CCP team will be traveling to a place no Campus Outreach Minneapolis CCP has traveled before…
Drum roll please…
…..THE U.K.
More specifically, England.
Even more specifically, Sheffield.
In a few short months, eight students and four staff members will say “cheerio” to Minnesota and begin their adventure to Europe.
(Warning: I just spent an embarrassingly long time looking up “cliché British slang and idioms” on Google, and I fully intend to sprinkle a few throughout this blog post).
The crew will leave at the end of May, spend about 7 weeks in the UK, head to the Summer Training Project for *a fortnight to share what God did on their trip, and finally go back to good ol’ Minnesota.
(*A fortnight is two weeks. They will actually only be at Project for a week, but I wanted to use the word “fortnight”).
The team will spend some of their time traveling to various cities around England, but most of their trip will be spent in Sheffield, which is about two hours north of London.
I’m not on the CCP team, but I gathered information from two people who are. The rest of this blog is essentially written by them.
(Thanks, Kate and Ben!)
So why the U.K.?
The United Kingdom is a very strategic region with regards to reaching the world. According to Joshua Project, there are 8% evangelical Christians, but pastors in the UK that the CCP team has been in contact with say that is an incredibly generous estimate. In reality, a better estimate would be less than 1% evangelical Christian.
The United Kingdom is strategic because it is seen to serve as a gateway into many other places in the world, such as the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.
I’m convinced! But what will they be doing all summer?
The CCP team will be spending the majority of their time on two college campuses in Sheffield: The University of Sheffield, and Sheffield Hallam University. Between the two schools there are over 60,000 college students. They will be spending time meeting with students through various activities. They are praying that God will use this time to build relationships and open doors to share the gospel with students from places such as India, Oman, China, and others.
Only God can change hearts but we, as His children, can pray. Here are a few initial prayer requests from the team:
1) That God would continue to be faithful in bringing in supporters who would pray and/or give financially to our team.
2) That God would be working in England right now and softening students’ hearts to the gospel.
Start praying that God would do big things in the U.K. this summer and beyond.
Cheers!