The leaders and I were sensing that this year God was going to give us a great harvest of souls and in one day God gave us a glimpse of what He wanted to do.
In the previous new student outreaches, we would plan out activities where we might attract about 100-200 people new students (total) – this is what our yearly attendance record would indicated.
This year as we were planning for the harvest of souls, we released many of the students to plan out the various outreaches through the dorms. The exciting part of all this was that we had a handful of students who were Residence Hall Directors. We purposefully and actively worked with these RH Directors to plan out some events directly in the dorms.
We had various events planned in about 7 different dorms. Due to our connections with the RH Directors, our events were one of the first ones that the freshmen were going to experience.
I just got an e-mail indicating that after the one day event this past Wednesday, we reached out to approximately 800 freshmen! Some of the dorms events had about 200-300 new freshmen attend… this is just incredible! And just to think that this was just one day’s worth of outreaches. We have about 3 more in the next 5-6 days.
God is truly giving us favor… for which we are truly humbled and thankful.
The part that encouraged me the most is that people are really living out our last 2-year theme of “The Church Beyond the Walls.” People have seriously taken this call to be more missional; and they have brought the Gospel to where the people need it the most.
As we continue to focus and depend on the Lord, it is just possible that this coming year we will see the University of Michigan transformed with the love of Christ.