Rising Flood Waters

by Rhys Ewing

Our vision with the Graduates Fund is to flood God’s church with Christian leaders, so naturally we need a lot of Christian leaders to achieve this vision. But how are we going to reach them so that we can then train, equip and encourage them for future ministry? And what do we do when those numbers don’t reach our hopes and expectations?

In partnership with the EU on campus we have been working hard to reach students that may join this flood over the last few weeks. As the university welcomed new students and reconnect with old during Orientation Week, we made hundreds of new contacts that we have been inviting to get involved with the EU. Over the past few years those few days have seen the number of new contacts reach into numbers as high as six, seven and eight hundred people! But this year we only made about four hundred. Zac Lukins, one of the students who helped organise Project Connect believed there were a number of contributing factors. “There seems to be a bias against faith based societies,” he said, “The stall location was not very helpful. The union also restricted our advertising ability during O-Week and we weren’t able to reach out to people outside our space allocated which I think impacted the number of new contacts we made.”

In order to reach out to more contacts we had to work extra hard in weeks one and two running more BBQs, contact tables in key student areas, and advertising well to invite as many new students to Public Meetings as we could. This hard work has allowed us to make contact with over 600 new students that we are currently working at getting enfolded into the EU community!

This year has given us an opportunity to rethink the way we do connecting. Is it time that we work much harder at connecting with churches? Schools? Camps? It has been a real wake up call to get innovative with our connecting so that many more may be equipped for service in God’s Kingdom.

As he reflected, Zac said “In the end God is sovereign regardless of the number of people we connected to, even if it’s 500 and not 800, those 500 people matter.” It is our good Heavenly Father who brought to us many students to be raised up into Biblically and theologically mature, servant hearted, and innovative Christian leaders. Praise be to God!

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