As we try to labor to meet students and try to get an opportunity to earnestly and lovingly share the prism we derive our perceptions through with them, we have seen God work in ways that only he can. In Australia, people have been burned by the church. This is a post-christian culture. If you don't know what that means, google it. You're online already, might as well learn something. So, in this post-christian culture evangelism takes time. Very rarely is cold-turkey evangelism even accepted much less successful. We've been going on campus to meet students with the intention of hanging out with them again; we do this with the hope that through prolonged relationships we can either share Christ with them, plug them into an existing campus ministry, or preferably both.
I'll share two highlights from this week:
In Australia they refer to dormitories or on-campus housing as "colleges." Students don't go to college and live in the dorms, they go to university or "uni" and live in the colleges, or at least a very small percentage do. U-Syd is a commuter school so very few students actually live in the colleges. They are generally populated by the elite students and are very similar to a fraternity or sorority in the US. Out of about 45,000 students at U-Syd about 2,000 live on campus. Campus Outreach has historically worked in on-campus housing because of the huge potential to start a movement in them. Students live in close quarters so if Jimbo was smoking weed in his room yesterday and is reading his bible today, people notice! Close quarters just work great when you're trying to invest deeply in a few people. Now that you have the background information I'll make my point. Yesterday we were able to attend a student-run Bible study in one of the colleges. It was started about two years ago and now has about 12-15 people who regularly attend. This was a God-given opportunity to get into the colleges and see what the spiritual condition is. We've been praying for that opportunity since we got here. That seems like a very small victory from the outside looking in, but it is actually a huge one. This is exactly where I would want to get started with full-time ministry if that's what we were doing and that could be the case one day. A large portion of our purpose in coming here was to investigate the campus, and this was a HUGE stride in that direction.
The next huge bit of progress I've seen personally was a friendship I was able to make today with a student at another campus, UTS. His parents immigrated to Australia from Vietnam and he has become relatively faithful in attending the SOW meetings over the last semester or so. (SOW is the main ministry we're partnering with since arriving). He is also an atheist. In the states we have many people who don't have to guts to admit that they may not buy the whole God thing and instead claim to follow a god that they do not know or understand; this is not the case with my friend. He didn't grow up around Christianity, and right now he's just checking it out. Today we were able to talk for a long time about his spiritual journey and the problems he has with Christianity. They are legitimate concerns that we should all understand about our faith and I was happy to try to talk him through them. I told him that I didn't have all the answers but he's reading a book that should help him reason some things out. Please pray for my friend. I believe that faith in Christ is a gift from God by his grace, and because of that am asking God to give him faith to believe. It's an unusually strong burden that God has given me for this guy and I don't believe it's for naught. I really want to see him get to know Christ. I know God can save him and have no reason to believe that he won't. I'll keep you posted.
Cheers
