God is working among students!

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!