I have been very
encouraged to hear from you. You have
been sharing stories about what God is doing in you and through you as you walk
in obedience to His calling to bring His light of salvation to students on your
campus who live in darkness. I wanted to
share with you what Alyana and her ‘team’ learned about themselves and about
God this year as they serve Him on their campuses. I know you have similar stories – I hope we
can continue to encourage one another with accounts of His faithfulness and
grace in our lives!
From Alyana:
In this letter I don’t want to tell the entire history of
the ministry, but just to share what God has given us and what He is doing in
us. I hope I can do it.
This past year we have various moments when our plans
have not always worked out, but always there remained an ache in our hearts for
ministry. In many respects your coaching
tips have helped in strengthening the spirit of our team. The tips on unity of vision and dedication
have helped.... We even discussed some of the themes during our leadership
meetings.
For example, the topic of unity of vision helped me personally
to better think about and to pray for unity of the Spirit amongst us, about
whether or not it is visible in our ministry that we all are headed in the same
direction?!
I am also glad that James is our leader [a volunteer who
helps with the student ministry there].
He is an excellent leader. He has
many times discipled us, and what is cool, he often reminds us that we are all
valuable to God, valuable to Him even if we don’t serve Him – that He stays in
our hearts and we always have a personal relationship with Him. As well, James motivates us to ministry, to
evangelism, taking us to places in the Scriptures where God talks about how His
desires for our service/actions not to be service just for the sake of service
(actions for the sake of actions), but that ministry should come as an overflow
from Him.
Not long ago, at the time of James’ leaving, we met
together as a team for planning (someone else led the meeting). We didn’t even pray, we just planned. We did not evaluate the past unsuccessful
moments, our misses in things we recently planned. We did not even ask for God’s perspective on
these things. We just talked about how
to entertain the students for the coming month, just to plan for the
continuation of ministry…just for the sake of planning…
It was an unpleasant moment, but the Lord convicted us in
many respects about it later. We talked
by phone and discussed this meeting and came to the conclusion, that this is
service to the Lord and we should not do it only because we ought to do it, we should do it because
of God’s call, because of our commitment to Him. We became convinced of this through this
situation. I think this situation is good
a testimony for others so that they will not make the same mistake we did)))
I also wanted to say something about our general vision –
I think it’s good from time to time in the general meetings to talk about
vision – what it was in the beginning and how the Lord wants to develop it, to
move the team in one Spirit in the same direction.
And also it’s an excellent idea to entrust to a few
people the responsibility to pray specifically for the ministry. It gives us more confidence knowing that
someone is continually praying for the ministry. Of course this does not mean that others
shouldn’t pray who aren’t part of this focused prayer. It is just to give us confidence to know that
there is someone who is faithfully praying for the ministry and its goals.
And also I remain of the opinion that it is necessary to
give more time in meetings directed to our training and encouragement because
there are those among us who are students who come to the meetings, but seldom
go to church. They only hear about God in our meetings. So I think that it’s
important for them, just as it is for us, that our meeting be a time of
building rather than just sharing. Therefore we made a decision to spend more
time in teaching and building.
Now we have begun to practice inviting some seeking
students to discussion groups where we can pray together, participate together
which allows us to build a better relationship with them so they can see our
spiritual lives.
At the beginning of March we went to a conference for
non-believing students and it showed us really well how we can work
together. Everyone was responsible for
something. James and other leaders led
the conference. All went very well,
praise the Lord.
Coleen, I think that this year has been a time when we
came closer together as a team - as the Body of Christ. It probably always happens like this, but at
the same time we see encouraging things in the ministry from students. Some of them, after many discussion groups,
MovieClaps, Stories of the Soul, etc [evangelistic strategies] are starting to
search more for God and are asking more about Him.
We do not see a concrete number of new believers from our
ministry, but we are not discouraged as our hearts still ache in our passion
for ministry to students.
This is pretty much everything that I wanted to
share. It’s an overview our ministry for
this year. I hope that it becomes a good
lesson for other teams in Russia!
