One Reason

How many times do we feel like quitting? How many times do we feel overwhelmed, discouraged, hopeless? How many times do we want to give up on something that matters? But, how many times have we enjoyed the blessing of something we wouldn’t have if we’d quit?

The most meaningful times in life generally follow the most difficult trials.

Our enemy will give us a million reasons to quit on whatever matters most; whether that be on a person, a dream, or a goal. But we only need one good reason to stay the course.

My reason

Not once, not twice, but three times I gave up a chance for a beautiful Minnesota summer to go to Summer Training Project (STP) in South Carolina. Each year there were numerous instances when I was unsure if going to STP was the best option for me. I would ask myself, “Why am I doing this? Wouldn’t it be much better to get a job in Minnesota? Wouldn’t I earn more money that way? Why am I asking people for money? Wouldn’t it just be easier to stay home?” Consistently I would remind myself of why I was going.

Why did I spend my summers at Summer Training Project?: To make a bunch of money? No. To get a tan and practice my surfing skills? No. To see the lives of others and my life changed as we grow to know and love Jesus more? Absolutely.

My one reason of spending my summers in South Carolina was to grow more in my relationship with Jesus and be equipped to share his love with others. That one reason was enough for me to be able to say goodbye to my family and friends, be okay with making less money than I could at home, and do something out of my comfort zone. Personally, I grew immensely in my trust and reliance on God through my summers and now I am in one of the most meaningful times of my life as I share what I learned during in South Carolina with others. To me, nothing is better than sharing the love that God has lavished on us. Knowing that spending my summers at Summer Training Project allowed me to do that more confidently makes it all worthwhile.

Jesus’ Example

Jesus pressed on even though He wanted to give up.

Jesus knew that he would face suffering. He knew he would be betrayed by those closest to him. He knew he would be scourged, whipped, spit upon, crowned with thorns. He knew he would become sin, ultimately separating him from God. But that is the reason that he came (John 12:23, 27-28).

Jesus left his home in heaven to come to our broken earth. He experienced pain and rejection in order to be glorified. But this act was not selfish, it was the most self-less, loving act in history. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Not only did Jesus die for his friends, but he also died for his enemies. Jesus didn’t die for the righteous, he died for sinners. He didn’t die for the healthy, he died for the sick. He died for the very people that put him on the cross. He died for the people whose sin he took on and for which he suffered the wrath of God. He died for you and me.

His Reason

For the joy set before him.

“For the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted” (Hebrews 12:2-3).

Jesus just needed one good reason to press on through the pain. His reason was the joy set before him. You are that joy! You are the very reason he came! Jesus came to live the perfect life that we could never achieve. He came to die the death that we deserve, to pay the penalty for our sins. He came to destroy the works of darkness. He came to crush Satan under his feet. Even when Jesus was facing the toughest spiritual, emotional, and physical pain possible he stayed the course for us.  

He came to do all of this for you and me. He came because we could never do it by ourselves. He came because he loves us.

Our Reason

The joy set before us.

We run the race for the joy of knowing and loving Jesus more. We press on for the ultimate joy of eternal life in heaven. We do this not to glorify ourselves, but to glorify God. Whatever we may face in this life, we know that this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Corinthians 4:17).

When we feel like giving up, we must remember our reason for doing what we do. We remember the how our life was changed by Jesus and how he is able to change the lives of others. When we are in our deepest pit we remember that God is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20). We remember that God has an ultimate plan for us that we do not yet understand. We look to Jesus’ example and see that the most meaningful times in life generally follow the most difficult trials.

When we want to quit, we must remember: It takes pain to have progress. It takes hurt to have a healing. It takes a death to have a resurrection.

Harmon Squires
Campus Outreach Minneapolis
Bethel Campus Staff

Unexpected Savior

The following is the devotional from Northwestern's spring break trip last week:

If I told you that you were about to meet the most famous, impactful, powerful, loving, just, and creative king that has ever walked the earth; what would you imagine this person being and looking like? If you are anything like me, I doubt it is a relatively short and unattractive male that is a lowly carpenter.  Jesus was never the figure we thought He would be. In fact, almost everything about Himself was counter cultural and unexpected.

Jesus was born in an unimpressive manger, out of wedlock and in a town that was considered worthless. His birth was proclaimed and celebrated by magicians and pagans, even though he was the son of the most high God.  Then he grew up and began to do ministry with his handpicked disciples; who happen to all be fishermen and tax collectors that were not intelligent enough to become Pharisees and Scribes. He hung out with the sick, lame and rejected. With his newfound popularity and stardom, crowds tried to gather around him to make him King, yet he ran from them and pursued time alone with his father.

Then after all of his popularity and perfection, the Son of God would be wrongly hated and convicted of crimes he never committed. The people he came to save rejected and despised him. Then hanging on the cross he still loved those same people enough to ask his father to forgive them. What kind of King is this?

This is a King who knows what we need, even if we don’t. Eventually we begin to find this king in places that we would never expect along with more joy than we can ever imagine. He is a King waiting to be with us and walk alongside us in our pain and suffering.  Jesus seemingly always does the unexpected when interacting with people, whether they are righteous, sinful, doubters or untouchable. This also gives us hope, that he would meet us at our level of faith and show up in our lives in completely unexpected ways.

Nate VanZee
Campus Outreach Minneapolis
University of Northwestern Campus Staff

3 Prayers for Spring Break

Wait, so you didn’t go on a mission trip? What did you do while you were down there? You guys just had fun the whole time? 

Those are a few of the questions we get asked about our spring break trip every year. This is the 3rd time we’ve sent a group of students to South Carolina from St. Cloud. Each year, the number of students interested in the trip has grown. We brought 15 students with on the trip this year including both believing and unbelieving students. During the first morning of the trip, I shared 3 goals with the group that I was praying for out of the trip. 

1. That they would have a lot of fun
2. That they would be surprised by Jesus
3. That they would consider spending a summer there

The whole trip was a blast! There were numerous days where I had to slap myself because I couldn’t believe that I was working. Elisa (my staff partner) and I planned something fun for the group each day.

Day 1 included a lot of beach volleyball and catching up on sleep from the 24hr+ drive. That night we went to Nacho Hippo for dinner (everyone’s favorite place to eat in Myrtle Beach) and went to a movie at the cinema in Market Commons.

Day 2 we visited Charleston which is a couple of hours away from Myrtle Beach. The students loved seeing the historic architecture of the city.

Day 3 we worked on some projects on the hotel which had been hit by Hurricane Matthew in September. Later that night we went out to dinner at Myabi’s. All was going well until one of the students had an allergic reaction. Elisa and I spent the rest of the evening in the E.R. Thankfully all is well and that student learned to never eat shrimp again!

Day 4 we enjoyed beautiful weather. Most of the day was spent playing volleyball, ultimate frisbee, and swimming. A few students even tried their luck at surfing! That night we planned a photo scavenger hunt at Broadway at the Beach. We have a lot of competitive students involved, some of them even took the competition a little overboard. but overall it was a good time. 

After a fun filled week, we began the long trek home on Thursday and were thankful to be safely back in Minnesota by Friday night. Prayer #1 was most definitely answered!

While the trip isn’t exactly a mission trip per say, we use it as an intentional time to study the bible with students. As I mentioned earlier, a few of the students who came on the trip aren’t believers. Every morning we would have a Bible study with the group. We read through Mark in small groups and discussed what stood out to us and what questions we had. After reading in small groups we would discuss in the large group. One of the passages we read was Mark 10:25-27 which says:

 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God."

After reading that passage, one of the students said “What I’m learning is that its not about a checklist of things you can do, but that it is accepting God’s grace.” Another student said that over the trip she had learned more about Jesus than she had in her entire life before that!

After those responses to Jesus and the Bible, I would say that prayer #2 was also most definitely answered! 

One of the most encouraging things about this trip was seeing our student leaders take initiation and have conversations with the younger students. From the first day on, students were asking each other about their lives and more specifically about their summers. A few of our students are coming to project as room leaders this summer and intentionally challenged younger students to come this summer. After numerous conversations and getting a feel for what it would be like, several students have expressed interest in coming this summer. Two students in particular went from considering it as an option to making decisions to go! I felt so humbled by the fact that most of these conversations were happening apart from me. God was using our students to speak into the lives of other students! Prayer #3 was answered as well.

Spring Break 2017 was such an encouragement and I look forward to seeing how God will continue to use trips like these in the lives of our students!

Berto Ramos
Campus Outreach Minneapolis
St. Cloud State University Staff

Monotony and Life Change

I don't know if you ever feel this, but at times life can feel like an endless cycle of monotony. Winter is almost over, spring will be here, then summer, fall, and we start over again, again, again, and again. With each passing day and month I often find myself doing the same things over and over. Not only can my life feel boring, but when I think of what all people do, I see the same basic pattern: people graduate high school and work or go to college. Maybe they get married, have kids, watch their kids do the same thing, and get old. With some variation, generation after generation follows the same pattern.

In my fifth year of ministry, these same feelings can creep in. Every year, we follow the same basic pattern: move in, Bible studies, New Years Conference, retreats, spring break trip, Summer Training Project, and do the whole thing over again, again, again, and again. Whenever I have these feelings, I start to wonder what the point of all this is. Sadly, that is exactly how I felt as I was getting ready for our winter retreat a couple weeks ago.

Then it hit me. Nine years ago almost to the day, I was invited to a similar winter retreat with Campus Outreach as a freshman at the University of Minnesota. I was reluctant but had nothing else to do, so I went. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. I came into college looking for life in success and living the American dream. On a predictable retreat that Campus Outreach does every year, God did something amazing. He began the process of removing my shallow view of Christianity and showing me more and more that the only place I was going to find life was in Jesus.

If you’re looking for significance in the patterns of life without God, you won’t find it. It changes everything when you understand God is there, and He’s telling a beautiful story. It makes the world come alive. I can live fully in each moment as it comes and quickly slips past because I know God is in it. I don’t have to dread the future and doing the same things again and again because God will be there uniquely working in ways I sometimes can't even see or grasp.

Just like God used the winter retreat nine years ago to change my life, my prayer is that God will use this year's retreat in the lives of the students from St. Thomas who went. The retreat had all the components of a good retreat: fun games, good food and snacks, late night shenanigans (like a 3 mile hike to a waterfall at 2am), someone sharing their testimony, and time in the Bible. I don’t know what God will do through this weekend. Maybe as the time goes on, in 9 years from now, a student from this trip will look back and see how God used this past weekend to change their entire life. That would not be boring and predictable; it would be amazing.

Larry Martini
Campus Outreach Minneapolis
St. Thomas Campus Director

How Does CO Build Laborers for the Lost World?

Campus Outreach's vision statement goes as follows “Glorifying God by Building Laborers on the Campus for the Lost World.” If you are familiar with our ministry, you probably understand how we seek to build laborers on the campus. So what do we mean by “for the lost world?” The college campus is filled with lost people from all over the world, so maybe that’s it? If that were the case, then we could say we are “building laborers on the campus for the campus”. However, our aim is to reach the world by changing the lives of students on campus during their college years. What kind of impact would our students have if their influence ended after four short years on campus? Jesus came to save the world and the world is where must go. Four years in college can have a profound impact if your goal reaches beyond the campus walls into the real world and the lost world. So how does Campus Outreach seek to do this? One way is through effectively mobilizing graduates.

All Campus Outreach Regions have a desire to mobilize graduates well. In many regions there is a staff person dedicated to this job, and a few regions even have a team of mobilization staff. Our goal as mobilization staff, is to launch students effectively into the three areas they might go: the campus, the city, and the world. A few students will come back to campus by joining our staff or another college ministry staff. Some will go to the world as vocational or non-vocational missionaries. Most will get a job in Minneapolis or St. Paul, and hopefully be launched with a vision to reach their neighbors and coworkers. Each of these are vitally important to reaching the lost world. As Christians, there is a universal call on our lives to be witnesses for Christ. Full-time staff and missionaries aren’t the greater portion, and working a ‘normal’ job certainly isn’t the lesser portion. ALL are called by God and gifted by God accordingly. ALL are called to do good in what we do and where we do it, and both of those things are different for each person and in fact needs to be. As a ministry we want to hold all callings equal and if anything talk more about the city knowing that is where most of our students end up.  

A few of our goals in mobilization are:

1. Help students start to understand their unique gifting and what they enjoy doing

2. Help them gain a vision for how they can serve and leverage their gifts for God’s Kingdom and the benefit of those around them

3. Help connect them to others by getting them plugged into a good church and to others who have a similar vision

4. Help them to be excited about life after college and see that God has much ahead for them

As staff, we often talk about the success of our ministry being measured 20 years from now. We desire to be equipping life-long laborers for the lost world, and not just have a large number of students attend our events. May the Lord help us to equip students to transition well out of college into the real world so that they may witness to and have great impact on the lost world! Would you pray with us towards that end?

Mike Polley
Campus Outreach Minneapolis
University of Minnesota Director

Not What You Think it Means

"He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!” "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." 

Some of you might remember the above exchange in the movie, The Princess Bride. It happens between Vizzini and Inigo Montoya. Vizzini thinks himself a genius and Inigo picks up on his overuse of the word, inconceivable. Vizzini had been applying the word liberally and probably wasn’t using it in its proper context. Inigo calls him on it. 

A few years back I remember talking to a student leader who had been part of our Summer Training Project (if you’re a student, go ahead and click on that link 😉) about a similar exchange. Apparently one of our student leaders was chatting with a participant in the project who was struggling with some of the challenges of the Christian life. The student leader, sincerely hoping to help the participant, explained how he simply needed to “believe the gospel.” The participant, having heard the phrase repeated throughout the summer, exclaimed, “Everyone keeps telling me that, but I have no idea what that means!” I believe it may have been a bit more colorful, but you get the idea. 

Lingo Without Literary Understanding

Now, I wasn’t present at this exchange. I can’t speak with great certainty about the exactness of it, but I certainly understand the context and have heard similar exchanges happen in our ministry. I have no doubt the student leader was earnest and wanted to help. And, theologically speaking, I think the leader was on the right track. The danger, however, is that like many words or phrases in the Christian community, they can become lingo without literary understanding. That is to say, a word can simply be repeated because it’s been heard, but accurate understanding of the word is void. 

Certain words are heard by many of us from the pulpit, in the context of small groups, just outside the sanctuary after a worship service, or even around the dinner table that ultimately lose meaning because they’re simply repeated over and over again. It’s not that repetition is bad, not at all. However, repetition without explanation can be really harmful. We need to be careful about people, especially those who grow up within the Church, who know a lot of the right answers and are able to speak the right lingo but don’t really “mean what they think they mean”.  

We need to state biblical truths in fresh and new ways in order that they resonate with us and sink down deeply into the soul. I’m not talking about seeking to be hip or cool. Rather, I’m talking about stating biblical truths by explaining them fully, articulately, and as often as possible connecting them to the everyday stuff of life. And there may not be a more important word in all of the Bible than “gospel” that needs repeating in a fresh and new way. 

Learning From Paul — Appropriating the Gospel

Consider Paul’s confrontation of Peter in Galatians 2:11-16. I won’t get into all of the theological backdrop of the passage. But what I would like to point out is that Paul could have confronted Peter about a couple of ways he was in sin. He could have told Peter he was being racially insensitive. He could have told him he was simply pleasing people. But Paul didn’t mention either of those explicitly.  

What did he say?  

…I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel…

…we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified (Galatians 2:14-16, ESV).  

Paul saw the central issue Peter was struggling with as one that dealt directly with the gospel. Paul went beyond simply stating jargon, however. He is helping his Galatian audience understand that to feel a sense of superiority because of one’s ethnicity or religious heritage is to walk out of step with the truth of the gospel. Indeed, Peter was afraid in this particular instance of what others thought. And what one fears can usually be traced to what a person values. When someone understands how Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of our value we need not fear what others think.  

Paul spoke the truth of the gospel to Peter in the way Peter (and the church of Galatia) needed to hear it. He appropriated the message. This is what we all need to be able to do as we preach to ourselves first and foremost, and also as we preach to others. We need to heed Inigo Montoya’s advice and not "keep using that word” that may not mean what we think it means. More importantly, we need to figure out what the gospel means so that when we use that word we are confidently saying what we mean. 

Summary

Paul spoke the truth of the gospel to Peter in the way Peter (and the church of Galatia) needed to hear it. He appropriated the message. This is what we all need to be able to do as we preach to ourselves first and foremost, and also as we preach to others. We need to heed Inigo Montoya’s advice and not "keep using that word” that may not mean what we think it means. More importantly, we need to figure out what the gospel means so that when we use that word we are confidently saying what we mean.

Eric Lonergan
Campus Outreach Minneapolis
St. Cloud State Director

CONYC 2016 Recap

Thanks for praying!

New Years Conference was a huge success and we thank God for all that he did in the hearts and lives of all who attended. Check out the recap video below and photos from CONYC 2016 here.

Feel free to browse and listen to any of the conference rally or breakout talks on our website as well! newyearsconference.com/resources

2016 CONYC Conference Attendees

2016 COM Annual Report