FREE, New Leaders Training and Daniel

It's about a week since I last posted on here. Time for a bit of an update!

Last week was University of Salford Christian Union's gospel distribution week. Here's a few numbers for what happened:

5 days of gospel distribution

Nearly all CU members heavily involved in it
15 hours of having a stall in the foyer of the main building on campus
100s of good, gospel focussed conversations
1000 gospels distributed
1 in 20 students in Salford University now have a FREE gospel

It was a fantastic week and the CU members are really pleased (and pleasantly surprised!) with how it went. It was really encouraging seeing CU members step out of their comfort zones and doing questionnaires and handing out gospels. Great work guys!

This past weekend was the annual New Leaders Training conference. At this time of year, all the CUs in the country change leadership, so UCCF gets all the new CU exec members together in their regions for some training. This year we held our New Leaders Training in Leyland and Justin Mote joined us to teach us from the book of Daniel. The Staff and Relay workers pitched in to help train everyone for their new roles.

It was a brilliant weekend with fantastic teaching. Daniel is a wonderful book and is incredibly relevant for students today - its the story of four young Jewish men as they live with the challenge of living and speaking for God in an alien culture that's hostile to their faith.

One thing that encouraged me was seeing the new CU leaders became more and more excited about the gospel through the weekend. Being on exec is not about serving men or the CU, it's about serving the Lord, and the only way to motivate yourself to do that without being legalistic is in joyful response to the wonderful gospel.

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Colossians 3:23-24

This week Salford CU has their events week, so please pray for us that we'd be confident in sharing the gospel and that God would show Salford students that the gospel is true!

A reasonably exciting day

Today at Bolton CU we had a bit of a discussion about God's word and evangelism.

We read 1 Peter 1:23-25 and saw that it is the living and abiding word of God that causes us to be born again. We found out that this word of God is living and imperishable, and that it was the good news that was preached to us!

We also looked at Romans 10:11-17 and saw that for people to be saved from God's judgement they need to call on the name of the Lord - to trust and believe and seek mercy from him - and to do that we saw that people need to hear the good news being preached to them: faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes through the word of Christ!

There are around 11,000 non believers at the University of Bolton and these guys need to hear the good news and they need to receive God's word. Imagine my excitement as this tiny CU (7 students meeting in a small room) began to think for themselves about how they can go about getting God's word into students' hands!

They're now in the process of discussing how they can put on their first evangelistic event in years and how they can practically go about distributing as many FREE gospels as possible to their fellow students.



They've also decided to get a weekly prayer meeting going - as one student pointed out, without God involved, it's all pretty pointless! There are some really exciting ideas in the pipeline for how we can get these FREE gospels into peoples hands (watch this space!) and most CU members are thinking of personally handing out FREE gospels to their friends.

And, as if all that wasn't exciting enough, on her way out of the room where we meet one of the CU members got chatting to a random student and handed out our first FREE gospel: God's living and abiding word that brings rebirth is now in the hands of one more student in Bolton University.

So, if you're in the mood for praying, we'd appreciate prayers for...

1. the student who recieved a FREE gospel earlier today.
2. Bolton CU as they begin to think about ideas for how to distribute these FREE gospels.
3. God to work through this CU and to encourage them as they begin to do evangelism.
   

Free - what it's all about

Free

I've blogged about this in the past, now at last we can all see pictures!










Coming soon to a Christian Union near you! For more info, check out the Facebook Page or www.uccf.org.uk

UCCF's New Gospel Project "Free" - First Look!

We were privileged at the North West UCCF New Leaders Training weekend to be the first bunch of students to see the unveiling of UCCF's latest gospel project - Free (we didn't pay, Free is the name of the project!) The idea of this gospel project is to take the gospel of Mark, put it in a contemporary styled booklet and hand 400000 to the university CUs so that they can hand one out to every student in a university hall of residence in the UK.

This is an awesome undertaking in any case, but when you remember that this is the very word of God being placed in the room of every first year at university it really is amazing and I'm deeply grateful to UCCF and their supporters for taking the effort and putting up the cash for this project! Just think what would happen if the Holy Spirit opens the eyes of even a few of those that receive the gospels so that Jesus walks of the pages into their hearts and minds - I think we would see something close to revival in some of our universities!

I guess we won't know the level of success of any gospel project until we reach heaven but I do know of someone who's financial supporters are almost entirely made up of people who came to faith through a previous UCCF gospel project - so they do work!

Please, please, please join us with praying that these gospels would
fall into the right hands and that the Holy Spirit would open their
eyes so that they can see that it is the truth, place their trust in
the Lord Jesus as their personal saviour and have eternal life.

In terms of the design, I think the "Free" gospels look pretty amazing. There are six different covers which CU members are reminded not to try and collect as therefore only a fraction of the students in uni will get the gospels, which would be a disappointment. The covers are completely black with a bombed(?) stencil of Free on the back - very chic - and the inside pages are emblazoned with doodles around the block of text. The doodles are on twelve different themes (life, freedom etc) at relevant stages in the narrative.

On a side note, as far as I am aware, there is still a fair amount of money to be raised for this gospel project, so please support the efforts of one staff worker and two Relay workers to raise money - if Nick Warner raises more money than the Peter Dray and Sarah Dawkins, Peter has to wear a tutu for a day and Sarah has to dress up as a banana. If Sarah and Peter raise more money, Nick, a die hard Blackburn Rovers fan has to wear a Burnley (hated rivals of Blackburn) shirt for a day. Check out the Facebook group for more details! Last time I checked, £150 had been raised and Nick was losing.

Check here for more details about the gospel project.

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