Every year, Bethlehem Baptist Church has a week and half event called Global Focus. Over the last few years, Campus Outreach has also hosted our own missions event in connection to Bethlehem’s focus on the world. At our Missions Night, students were able to hear more about God’s heart for the world. The two topics that were covered this year by our guest speaker were: ‘What is the Task Remaining?’, and ‘How have College Students Impacted World Missions?’. Students from all five of our campuses attended.
As a ministry, one of our priorities is to expose all of the students we lead to the needs of the world and to help them understand that the Gospel is a global message. Because the needs of the world are so great, we as a ministry want to create and expose our students to opportunities to serve overseas. Currently we have 8 former students who are serving overseas. As God wills, we would love to send more to help the Gospel spread to all the people groups in the World. Not only do we have our own international ministries, but we have also partnered with a few organizations to give students many different ways to get overseas. One ministry focused on providing students with an opportunity so use their field of study while partnering with a long term missionary for two years. Another organization places english teachers all over the world which allows them to have access to harder to reach countries. Last, we as a ministry have two-year internships with all our international regions that allow our graduated to continue to do college ministry, but in an international context. We hope that by providing these three pathways, more students will see that God can use them to impact the world and that he uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
At the end of the night, we asked student to consider a next step to increase their awareness and their love for the world. The responses below were encouraging:
29 Students committed to memorizing at least one Bible Verse from our Missions Notebook
14 Students committed to completing the Missions Bible study we gave them
24 Students said they want to join the support team of a current missionary
5 said they wanted to help start a world prayer group on their campus
14 students said they are interested in our Summer Cross Cultural Project (CCP) that went to Brazil last year for two months.
The next couple weeks our staff team will be individually following up with students to help them be faithful to their goals. We are currently finalizing our 2019 CCP location but we would love to be able to send a full team to Brazil again like last year!
Mike Polley
Campus Outreach Minneapolis
Mobilization Director